Dialup Authentication Outages

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     We experienced a couple of outages in dial-up authentication yesterday and
the day before.

     This was one of those things that wasn't supposed to happen.  There are
two seperate T1 circuits to the location where the authentication servers are
that are supposed to be routed on different telco facilities so that there is
not a common point of failure. 

     As it turns out the local telco routed both through the same switch and
mis-routed both not once but twice causing the outages. 

     One of the circuits is being re-routed to provide a fully redundant
connection to this facility but in addition another radius authentication
server is being located at another site to provide a backup in the event of a
future failure of the theoretically redundant circuits.

     I apologize to everyone who was affected and I just wanted to let you all
know that steps are being taken to prevent a reoccurance in the future.