------------------ Y2K UPGRADE UPDATE ------------------ As announced in BCPL.NET System News dated December 1, on Sunday December 5 we upgraded the operating system and miscellaneous other software on MAIL.BCPL.NET, our primary UNIX computer (a Sun SPARCserver 1000e). The primary reason for the upgrade was to make the computer Y2K compliant. The upgrade took longer than expected (I guess we should have expected that), so MAIL.BCPL.NET was off line for most of the day. When it came back up late Sunday afternoon there were still a few things not working right. For most of you the most obvious of these was probably the POP3 server software, which refused to serve up your mail. That turned out to be the combined effect of a configuration error (a stupid little typo) and the need to recompile the POP server software under the new operating system. By late Sunday night most of the major services running on MAIL.BCPL.NET were working well. Then on Monday morning the computer's Fast Ethernet card died, making MAIL.BCPL.NET unreachable again. We reconfigured the Sun to use its on-board Ethernet port, and all seemed well. Then at 5:30 AM Tuesday, when the Sun did its scheduled automatic reboot, the Ethernet configuration reverted to the dead Ethernet card. This was discovered and rectified when I came to work at 8:00 AM, but from 5:30 AM through 8:00 AM MAIL.BCPL.NET was again unreachable. Everything seems to be working fairly smoothly as I write this, but keep your fingers crossed. UNIX shell account users will notice that some UNIX commands (3rd party programs not supplied by Sun) still do not work. We are gradually restoring those from tape and, when necessary, recompiling them to work under the new operating system. The next step will be a hardware upgrade to triple the processing power of MAIL.BCPL.NET. The necessary parts have been ordered, and should be installed later this month. For the technically inclined, the SPARCserver 1000e currently has a single system board with two 85 MHz SuperSPARC+ processors and 256 MB of RAM. When the hardware upgrade is completed, it will have three system boards, six 85 MHz SuperSPARC+ processors, and 1.5 GB of RAM. That should make it fly! If we need even more power in the future, the SPARCserver 1000e can be expanded to a total of four system boards, eight 85 MHz SuperSPARC+ processors, and 2 GB of RAM. As soon as we have a firm date for the hardware upgrade, I will let you know via BCPL.NET System News. Thanks for your patience during the Y2K upgrade! BCPL.NET INTERNET SERVICES CONTACTS: ----------------------------------- Administration & Policy: ispadmin@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 Sales, Renewals, Account Status: accounts@bcpl.net 410-887-4172 Technical Support (Help Desk): help@bcpl.net 410-887-3297 Usenet News Newsgroup Requests news-admin@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 E-Mail & Newsgroup Abuse Reports: abuse@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 FAX: 410-887-2091 Help Pages: http://www.bcpl.net/help.html (or enter "help" at the UNIX shell prompt) System News Archives: http://www.bcpl.net/sysnews.html (or enter "sysnews" at the UNIX shell prompt)