Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 09:07:27 -0400 (EDT) From: BCPL.NET SysAdmin To: BCPL.NET News Subject: BCPL.NET NEWS: Power Failure Causes Service Interruption ----------------------------------------- POWER FAILURE CAUSES SERVICE INTERRUPTION ----------------------------------------- Some time around 12:30 AM this morning (Monday, July 8) we lost electrical power in parts of the building. All equipment used by BCPL.NET is on uninterruptable power supplies, so everything kept running on battery power as long as the UPS batteries held out. Apparently some didn't hold out quite long enough, because some equipment eventually shut down. Among them was our main UNIX server (mail.bcpl.net), which went down at about 2:00 AM. Unfortunately it came back up in an unstable condition when the power came back on, so it was unreachable until 7:30 AM when I rebooted it. The symptoms you may have experienced depended on what you were trying to do while the server was down. If you were already dialed in when the shutdown occurred, you could browse the Web, but you could not send or receive e-mail, access the BCPL.NET web site, or make Telnet or FTP connections to your UNIX shell account. If you were trying to make a dialup connection while the server was down, you could not because your username and password couldn't be authenticated. Our apologies for the interruption. By the way, a common question at times like this is "If someone on the Internet is trying to send e-mail to someone at BCPL.NET when the mail server is down, is that message lost forever?" No, it isn't, thanks to two failsafe provisions built into the Internet mail delivery system. o Our main mail server (mail.bcpl.net) has a backup mail server (mail.uu.net) that is outside our network. If our mail server (or even our entire network) is unreachable when a remote mail server tries to deliver mail to us, the remote mail server deliver to our backup mail server instead. The backup mail server stores the mail and delivers it to us when our main mail server becomes reachable again. o In the unlikely event that both our main mail server and our backup mail server are unreachable, the remote mail server queues the message and keeps trying to deliver it, normally once every hour for the next five days. The above applies to mail marked "first-class" (normal personal e-mail) and "list" (most mailing list mail). Mail marked "bulk" (some mailing list mail) or "junk" is normally just discarded by the sending mail server if it isn't deliverable on the first attempt. Chip -- BCPL.NET INTERNET SERVICES 320 York Road Towson, MD 21204-5179 U.S.A. CONTACTS: -------- Web Site: http://www.bcpl.net 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 Domain Name Service Issues: dnsadmin@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 FAX: 410-887-2091