Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 02:53:02 -0500 (EST) From: BCPL.NET SysAdmin To: BCPL.NET News Subject: BCPL.NET NEWS: Router Failure ---------------------------------------------------- ROUTER FAILURE CAUSES PROLONGED SERVICE INTERRUPTION ---------------------------------------------------- At about 12:30 PM on Tuesday January 28 the router that connects us to the rest of the Internet failed. This cut off communication between us and the Internet, as well as between several parts of our wide area network that connect to each other via that router. If you are a BCPL.NET dialup customer who was already connected to BCPL.NET when the failure occurred, you could not reach anything out on the Internet, and you probably could not reach the mail server, the Web server, or anything else on our internal network. If you tried to establish a new dialup connection after the failure occurred, you were probably unable to do so. If you are a BCPL staff member, your ability to access the Internet and some resources on the BCPL wide area network was disrupted by the failure. We were able to restore communication between the branch libraries and most of the library's mission critical resources by rerouting data traffic around the failed router, but not access to the Internet or to the mail server. Replacement parts for the router are scheduled to be delivered some time on the morning of Wednesday January 29, and will be installed immediately upon arrival to restore full service. This failure and several modem pool failures that plagued us during the last few months of 2002 were all caused by a condition called "zinc whiskers" that is peculiar to old computer rooms (ours dates from about 1982) with raised floor panels. I won't go into all the gory details here, but if you're curious about zinc whiskers go to the Google search engine Web site (www.google.com) and enter "zinc whiskers" as your search term. To cure our zinc whiskers problem we have contracted with a professional data equipment cleaning service to decontaminate the computer room and all the equipment in it. This work will be done during the late night of February 12 and the early morning of February 13, and will disrupt dialup access for a few hours within that time frame. I will post a more exact time for the outage via BCPL.NET News as soon as the work schedule is finalized. In the mean time dialup customers would be wise not to plan anything requiring Internet access between about 11:00 PM February 12 and 6:00 AM February 13. -- 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