Dec 7-10 1996 outage: repercussions

As you know, MV was off the air for nearly three days from late Saturday December 7 through Tuesday Dec 10. There are some predictable repercussions of this outage that we'll see for a little while:

MAIL.

Out there in the net there's a 3-day backlog of mail waiting to be sent to us. There's also a lot of mail that you are probably waiting to send out. Most of the incoming mail will all try to come through during the first day, much of it during the first part of that day. This will put at least an order of magnitude more load on the system(s) here than they are used to, and some processing will slow down under the increased work. Also, the mail system is designed to refuse incoming mail if its workload gets too high, and then to start accepting mail again when the workload is reduced again. Under a very heavy overload such as we expect, this will result in the server alternately accepting mail and refusing mail (the period of refusal may be a minute or two). This will affect you if you try to send mail through the mail server when it is refusing connections. If this happens, you'll see it mainly during the first day or so that we're back. If you get a connection refused when sending mail, please just give it another try.

Another aspect of mail: most mailboxes at MV have a quota of 2.5 MB, and when the mailbox gets to be above that size, no more mail is accepted. Because there's lots of mail waiting to come in, we've increased that default to 3.5 MB. (Part of the reason for the normal quota on the mailbox is to keep the mailbox manageable: if the mailbox gets too large it becomes impossible to use.) After two weeks we'll set the quota back to 2.5 MB again.

NEWS.

There's also 3 days of usenet news waiting to be sent to us. We'll likely get a flood of it over the next couple of days, and some of the news may be behind as a result. Regional news should be more up to date than non-regional news, since we get small regional feeds from many sources and those are likely to get sent to us ahead of the other large feeds. However, we may experience news disk space shortages as we receive several times the amount normally expected during a short period. (This may oscillate somewhat until it settles down.)

ACCESS.

Many people have been waiting to get back online, so the phone lines are probably going to get hit a lot harder than usual for the first few days. Please try to be aware of this when you're online, or when you're waiting to get in.

BILLING.

We'll treat this as a 3-day outage and will be discounting 10% from your bill for December. Users who have prepaid dedicated lines will receive a 3-day extension on their service. Ordinarily we don't rebate for unplanned outages, since service slightly delayed is still available within a reasonable timeframe. However an outage of several days represents service that can not be reasonably delayed.