Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 13:16:30 -0400 (EDT) From: BCPL.NET SysAdmin To: BCPL.NET News Subject: BCPL.NET NEWS: Mail Server Boot Problem -------------------------------------------------------- MAIL SERVER BOOT PROBLEM CAUSES FAILURE OF SOME SERVICES -------------------------------------------------------- At 5:30 AM today (Saturday June 28) during a scheduled reboot, the Ethernet interfaces on mail.bcpl.net (our mail server) failed to come up. This in turn caused a number of services that depend on network access to fail to start properly. I brought the interfaces up manually at about 7:00 AM, but the server remained extremely unstable until about 12:15 PM. 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 crash occurred, you could no longer 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 dial-up connection while the server was down, you may or may not have succeeded because username and password authentication was not working reliably. Things are running fairly well as I write this, but obviously this should not have happened on a server that is only two months old and that has been running flawlessly for those two months. I'm working with tech support at Sun Microsystems to determine why the boot failure occurred, and to see what we can do to prevent it from occurring again. Our apologies for the interruption, and thanks for your patience. 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