Hello: I am forwarding a message from the owner of RootsWeb. I really do not understand most of it, but maybe it might mean somthing to some of you. Just know that they might have lost some mail and archives. << Start of Forwarded message via Prodigy Mail >> From: Brian Leverich Subject: Internet Message Date: 03/09 Time: 08:13 PM Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: from fp-1.rootsweb.com (fp-1.rootsweb.com [207.113.233. 233]) by pimaia1y-ext.prodigy.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA80224; Mon, 9 Mar 1998 20:10:17 -0500 Received: (from [email protected]) by fp-1.rootsweb.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA05684; Mon, 9 Mar 1998 16:58:58 -0800 (PST) Resent-Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 16:58:58 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <[email protected]> To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] cc: "Dr. Brian Leverich" <[email protected]> Reply-to: "Dr. Brian Leverich" <[email protected]> Subject: Serious Problems Out on the Net (and at home) Date: Mon, 09 Mar 1998 16:58:50 -0800 From: Brian Leverich <[email protected]> Resent-Message-ID: <"4jwobD.A.fvG.94IB1"@fp-1.rootsweb.com> Resent-From: [email protected] X-Mailing-List: <[email protected]> archive/latest/37 X-Loop: [email protected] Precedence: list Resent-Sender: [email protected] As many of you have undoubtably noticed, the last week has been a mess out on The Net. Starting one week ago, some clown has been strobing all the hosts and routers on the Internet with an attack that is fatal (locks the machine such that it has to be power cycled to restart) to Win 95 and Win NT boxen. While this didn't directly affect RootsWeb (we're wall-to-wall Unix servers), it did kill one of our network neighbors' NT server. Unfortunately that NT server was providing reverse DNS for some of RootsWeb's boxes, so the NT server's repeated crashes caused major problems for us. It especially slowed mail deliveries from our list servers. To deal with this problem, the NT server has been "patched" to reduce its vulnerability to attack and we have taken various other technical measures to make us safer. Last night at 2am Sprintlink, with no warning to any of its customers, attempted to upgrade the operating systems on its backbone routers throughout the country. Things went badly south, and the Net is still very much crippled right now. The Sprintlink disaster essentially disconnected pieces of RootsWeb from The Net for several hours until we could adjust our routers to work around the down pieces of Sprintlink's backbone. As the Sprintlink disaster rippled through The Net, it also took down the routers at our feed from CRL. That happened while Karen and I were away from our keyboards, and the CRL down wounded our main list server. Some mail was lost, and we suspect some digests were damaged. We'll be fixing things for a few days. ): Ultimately there is no way that an individual site can insulate itself from a mess like last night, but we will be able to better protect ourselves as RootsWeb grows and operates more T1 connections to more Internet backbone carriers. Finally, this morning at 10am the textbase harddrive in the search engine box glitched and wedged, killing that server. Karen and I were working at that machine's console to revive it when the CRL link went down, which was why we couldn't save the mail server. Disk problems like this should go away as we upgrade all our servers to using redundant RAID-5 disk arrays, rather than depending on single drives. *sigh* Thank goodness weeks like this don't happen too often. As noted above, we'll be doing what we can to insulate ourselves from these sorts of problems in the future. One other thought: Karen and Brian will be away from our consoles all day tomorrow traveling on business that is critical to RootsWeb's future. It worries us a lot to leave the servers without someone physically at the consoles, but there will be some great sysadmins monitoring the site remotely and we think the potential benefits of this trip outweigh the risks of leaving the servers for a day. We apologize in advance if anything goes wrong, and we will be back late tomorrow night in any case. Cheers, B. -- Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD- L RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb. com/ P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 [email protected] com << End of Forwarded message >> ____ Nancy Lohbrunner [email protected]