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POWER OUTAGE SUNDAY NIGHT REDUCES SERVICES
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Sunday night, some time around 9:00 PM, our section of Towson had a
blackout.  I didn't become aware of the problem until 10:10 PM when my
telnet session from home to the Sun SPARC 1000 (our UNIX host)  died. 
Apparently that was when the battery in the SPARC 1000's uninterruptable
power supply gave out. BG&E restored power at about 11:30 PM, and
everything is back to normal. 
 
Our access servers and routers are in a separate computer room with a VERY
large UPS, so they never lost power.  Therefore users who already had PPP
connections remained connected and were able to browse the Web.  However
they were not able to send or receive e-mail, telnet to their UNIX
accounts, or anything else requiring interaction with the SPARC 1000. No
new connections were possible during the outage because the SPARC 1000 is
the user authentication server for dialup connections.
 
I have no idea what caused the blackout, and won't be able to find out
until Monday morning.
 
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If you have questions about this, or about anything else related to
your BCPL Internet Account, please contact the BCPL Help Desk.

 Phone:   410-887-3297
 FAX:     410-887-2091
 E-Mail:  help@mail.bcpl.lib.md.us

 Help Pages:            http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/help.html
                        (or enter "help" at the UNIX shell prompt)

 System News Archives:  http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/sysnews.html
                        (or enter "sysnews" at the UNIX shell prompt)