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Subject: Women-in-Hockey Digest V1 #172
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Women-in-Hockey Digest    Saturday, March 28 1998    Volume 01 : Number 172



In this issue:

   WARNING! System failure at Plaidworks (list subscription info lost!)

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Date: Sat, 28 Mar 1998 16:30:57 -0800
From: Chuq Von Rospach 
Subject: WARNING! System failure at Plaidworks (list subscription info lost!)

This notice is being sent out to all subscribers of mailing lists at
Plaidworks.com.

On Friday night, about 5PM, we suffered a significant system outage.
The system that we use to run our mailing lists was taken down for some
routine maintenance, and during that, something went wrong and
afterwards, the system refused to reboot. Eventually, we had to
reinstall the system's software and recover from backup tapes.

The good news is that we are now, about 23 hours later, almost back on
the air.

The BAD news, unfortunately, is that due to a failed backup tape, we
lost the last three weeks of subscription requests for the lists. We
had to back up to a previous set of backup tapes (made on March 3), so
all of our subscriber lists are from that date.

If you are one of the users who's unsubscribed in the last three weeks,
that's why you've magically re-appeared on our lists. We ask you to
either unsubscribe again, or send us e-mail and ask us to take care of
it (if possible, please do it yourself -- we expect to be somewhat
backed up as we continue to recover from this failure and the requests
we expect to get....If you do ask us for help, please be patient).

Unfortunately -- we've lost the last three weeks of subscriber data.
Trust Murphy to nuke the data that is the hardest for us to get back
(computer software we can always recompile. The subscriber lists, we
don't know who's subscribed.) -- so please, PASS THE WORD. If you know
of users who've joined plaidworks recently, or if you have sites with
links to our site, please post a notice for a couple of weeks
announcing this problem and asking users to re-subscribe.

We have not yet turned on incoming mail to plaidworks -- mail is not
being bounced, but we aren't yet processing it. Once this message goes
out and we re-verify that our systems are running right, then we'll
start processing incoming mail. We wanted to get the word out on this
failure first, so users would know what's going on -- all of the mail
queued up is oging to get processed in a fairly small period of time,
so expect a real burst this evening.

Our web servers were not affected during this outage, just the mailing
list servers. And as of now, most of the services have been restored.
The one exception (that I know of) is the search engine, which will be
back online sometime Sunday. Until then search attempts will fail.

We apologize for the outage and the problems this cause. I'm still not
at all sure HOW this happened. It wasn't a hardware or a software
failure to the best of my knowledge, but something happened that caused
the Unix box to decide to refuse to reboot. AIX can be like that some
days (but fortunately, rarely). we'll be analyzing the failure in more
detail once we're sure things are stable, to try to improve things so
we can recover faster if things like this DO happen again, and
hopefully, keep it from happening at all.

If you run into a problem, PLEASE let us know -- don't assume we
already know of the problem, because we probably don't. After a
situation like this, loose ends happen, and if you help us find them,
we can help tie them up faster.

Again, our apologies for the problems this has caused. (the only silver
lining is that it finally gave me a great reason to upgrade our Unix
box to the currrent release of software, so at least I won't have to
take the system down later for that... but I'd rather have not done it
at midnight last night....)

Sincerely,

Chuq Von Rospach
	co-owner, Plaidworks Consulting





- --
Chuq Von Rospach (Hockey fan? )
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:email@hidden)
Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:email@hidden)
 + 

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End of Women-in-Hockey Digest V1 #172
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