r3-collab Status

(and status of other IEEE Internet services hosted here)

Warning, this page is manually maintained and thus may lag real events

News

This page exists! I will try to keep this page current so that r3-collab users may look here to check status of the newsgroup server. to use when servers are down and you want to send me a message -- DaveG

Planned Outages

2005-04-01 - Building power will be off for a major transformer upgrade from 5pm 1 April 2005 until 5pm 3 April 2005.

Backup Window

Nightly backup shuts down the newsserver for a few minutes in the neighborhood of 2am Central time.

Recent 'Events' (most recent first)

• 2003-12-15 - (Not quite planned) The NNTP port to our newsgroup server was missed in writing the firewall rules so access was blocked until mid-day today when the outage was reported.

• 2003-12-13 - A firewall is being installed at the UAB School of Engineering today. All servers will be given private IPs and then mapped back to their original outside numbers for external use of particular ports. r3-collab will continue to be accessible through http, sftp, and ssh. The servers will unavailable from about 7:30am CST when firewall installation begins until sometime later in the day when the servers are reconfigured to work with the new firewall.
• 2003-05-23 - A power transient disturbed most of the systems in the UAB Engineering building including the TWiki and newsgroup servers. They were restarted before anyone reported their outage but the exact duration of their unavailability is uncertain.
• 2002-12-11 - Well, quickly announced at least -- we have been informed by the power company that power to the Engineering Building where the server(s) are located will be interrupted. The machines will be shutdown immediately (10:22pm EST) and will be brought back up in the morning (10am EST or so).
• The School of Engineering building experienced a power outage at 6:50pm CDST 30 May 2002 probably associated with a severe thunderstorm that passed through. The schools servers, the ETI DB server, the TWiki server and the newsgroup server are all down. Power was out for about 3 hours but the servers were not restarted till the following day.
• 2001-03-15 - There was a planned outage 15 March starting sometime beyond 8pm Eastern time until sometime early in the day on March 16th. The main power breaker to the building where the server is housed was being replaced causing a total building outage. Since the outage will be longer than the UPS time, the server was shutdown and restarted.
• 2001-02-23 - We are going to try replacing the battery on the motherboard to see if that will fix our date loss problem.
• 2000-11-30 One hour announced outage to install a larger switch (share monitor, keyboard, monitor among more servers.)
• 2000-10-30: While not really an outage of r3-collab, UAB's ISP had problems connecting UAB to Internet from about 2pm (on 29th) until 1 am. Some informal checking suggests that many second tiers were having problems so the outage may be broader.
• 2000-10-27: r3-collab continues to have an intermitant power problem where the system will just shut itself off. Various efforts have been made to isolate the problem (there are no finger pointing log entries) but as yet no success. Today, the harddrives of the machine were moved to another machine thus hopefully allowing an isolation of the problem to hardware or software. The BIOS date on the new host was not configured properly during the move causing the newsserver to refuse to send out information in NNTP and in the web interface. There has been a report that some software clients who touched the server during this time are 'confused' and need to be re-initialized.