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ACCESS SERVER UPGRADES, PART 2
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Tuesday and Wednesday (January 6 & 7) were definitely not high points in
the annals of modern technology, at least not from my point of view!  The
new operating system version that Cisco Systems expected to cure
Dialup-1's spontaneous reboot problem did not cure it at all.  In trying
to sort out the problem it was necessary to take Dialup-1 down a number of
times during the day and early evening.  Each time this was done, anyone
connected to one of the modems in Dialup-1 was abruptly disconnected.  I
apologize for the frustration this caused, but it was unavoidable.

At about 9:00 PM Tuesday I brought Dialup-1 back up with its old operating
system and put a call in to Cisco's Technical Assistance Center (TAC).
They have asked for data that can be retrieved only immediately after a
crash, so late Thursday morning or early Thursday afternoon I will reload
the new operating system into Dialup-1 and force it to crash.  Once the
necessary data is retrieved, I will bring Dialup-1 back up under the old
operating system.  It will be left that way until TAC finds a solution to
the problem.

The K56FLEX upgrade to the modems in the rest of the access servers
(Dialup-2 through Dialup-7) scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday is on hold
until the problem with the operating system is resolved.  The K56FLEX
modems require the newer operating system, but we are unwilling to install
it in all the access servers until we are confident of its reliability.

I will post progress reports in System News when there is progress to
report.  I'm certain that there will be progress.  There are thousands of
identical access servers running quite happily all over the Internet.
There is just something peculiar to our setup that has thus far eluded us
and Cisco's TAC.

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