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ACCESS SERVER FAILURE REDUCES MODEM POOL
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Early on Monday September 8 our Help Desk began getting reports of fast
busy signals, the dreaded "We're sorry. all circuits are busy" recording,
extremely slow modem connections, PPP and TCP/IP protocol failures, and
other unusual connection problems. 

Investigation showed that the problems were being caused by Dialup-2, one
of our seven access servers.  Several modems in Dialup-2 refused to
respond to commands, and reset themselves to operate at port speeds much
lower than the normal 115,200 bps (one was operating at only 300 bps). The
switch at Bell Atlantic saw the circuits feeding those modems as being
available for use, so it kept trying to route calls to the bad modems. 
This prevented any calls from being routed to Dialups 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

At the suggestion of the Cisco Technical Assistance Center I reseated all
the modem cards. That seemed to solve the problem, and Dialup-2 operated
normally for several days.  Unfortunately it began acting up in exactly
the same way early this afternoon (Friday, September 12). 

Cisco is shipping a replacement access server, which should arrive on
Tuesday September 16.  In the mean time I have taken dialup-2 off line to
keep it from blocking calls to the remaining access servers.  This means
that instead of our usual total of 322 modems, we are down to 276 until
the replacement access server arrives. 

The smaller modem pool reduces our user/modem ratio to an unacceptable
level, so busy signals could become a problem over the weekend. To
minimize the possibility of busies, I have set the per-session time limit
back to its original three hours (it has been four hours for the past
month or so).  However with only 276 modems there are still likely to be
some busy signals during peak evening hours.  If you do get a busy signal,
please keep trying.

The replacement access server will be installed as soon as possible after
it arrives (it has to be configured first), and at that time the
per-session time limit will be reset to four hours.  I will post an update
to System News at that time.

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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)