Chat outage 6/30/99

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     We had an outage of chat.eskimo.com on 6/30/99.  I apologize for not
posting this to now. 

     Chat crashed; it appears the crash was caused by some I/O errors on the
swap partition leading to corruption of swap.

     When it tried to come back up, it bound to a ypserv running on our new SSL
server that wasn't ready for use; had no database, and thus couldn't serve maps
for eskimo.com domain.  Chat kept trying to bind to that machine and that
prevented it from coming up fully. 

     It took me a while to figure out what was going on and kill the ypserv
daemon on the new SSL server.

     The disks on chat are absolutely antique, so the fact that we get an
occasional error isn't real suprising. 

     I have hardware on order that will replace both chat and isumataq (two sun
LXs). These will be completely new boxes, new RAM, CPU, disk, everything.  The
new hardware will be faster than the existing machines (50mhz version 8 Sparc
vs. 16.7mhz [isumataq] and 25mhz [chat] version 7 Sparc). 

     The intent is, aside from saving a lot of electricity and reducing heat
production, is to load Sparc Linux on the new machines and set them up with
SunOS compatibility.  This will allow the existing binaries to run but it will
also make it possible to compile and execute newer versions of eggdrop and
newer MUD/Muck/Mush/Moo versions that won't compile in non-ANSI environments. 

     It's going to take some time to get these new machines setup and properly
secured, particularly with a number of other projects occuring simultaneously.