User Meeting, Eskinews, Network, Sunday...

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     Today hasn't been the greatest.

     Just minutes after I was up, got a page, news is down.

     I booted eskinews and since it wasn't halted clean it had to run fsck
on the partitions.

     It found an inconsistancy that couldn't be fixed with the automatic fsck,
so I had to run a second pass manually.

     While that was happening, it spontaneously rebooted and started a third.

     I left Catherine here and went to the meeting, just as I arrived at
Godfathers I received a phone call from Catherine, she had a family emergency
and had to leave, eskinews was still down. 

     So I had to leave as soon as I got there.  I apologize to all of you who
came that I wasn't there.

     The third pass of fsck finally finished and eskinews came back up around
4:30pm, it took about half an hour for a renumber to finish and it was
processing news again by approximately 5pm.

     Then this evening when I tried to write tapes, innd OOPS'd.  There is some
nasty bug in 2.2.15 that dump appears to trigger.  I already ran into this with
mx1.  So I've reverted both mx1 and eskinews to 2.2.14, and if I encounter
problems with other machines will do the same. 

     Because innd terminated abnormally (OOPS), the re-number had to run again,
which means another 1/2 hour with no news.  Also, I may need to take the system
down later to fsck the spool again, there is some indication that there may be
corruption. 

     There was also a network problem between about 1-2pm getting to UUNET, it
wasn't a problem at our end or for what I could see with Sprint, a traceroute
made it into alternet before dying, so something hosed there.

     Everything appears to be alive and operational again.  However, I do not
know if Aaron is going to make it in tomorrow morning.  This is his last week
and he e-mailed tonight to let me know he's not feeling well, and I don't know
if Catherin is goin to still be tied up with family problems.

     If there is not live help here, I will still be reachable by pager if
there is an emergency and Eric should be in in the afternoon/evening.

     If there is an emergency, system outage or security issue, please leave a
message and then push 1121 afterwards.  This will page me.  Please do not do
this for routine issues, i.e., forgotten passwords, new system that needs to be
reconfigured, etc. 

     Messages that are marked emergencies but are not will get placed at the
end of the queue because when I save voice mail which I need to do to get it
out of active queue so it doesn't keep paging, that's where it goes. 

     We are looking for a replacement for Aaron since this is his last week, we
need someone with both Linux/Unix admin skills and Windows/Mac knowledge that
can help users with setup and troubleshooting. 

     Aaron is leaving us for a position in the Linux development field.