A Message from the JBRAIN.COM Listserv Administrator

From: JBRAIN.COM LIST Administrator (listserv-admin_at_mail.jbrain.com)
Date: 1998-07-07 01:05:27

With receipt of this message, the mail.jbrain.com email system is now
operational.  I appreciate the patience on behalf of the many folks who use
our email services.  Although only time will tell if we have indeed fixed all
the problems inherent in our move, I am very optimistic that email should now
be stable.

For those who are wondering what happened, and why it took us so long to fix
the system, I'll summarize the problems.

On June 1, 1998, I came in to find the entire www.jbrain.com site down.  Since
the site is heavily connected to a database for page creation and service
usage, the loss of database connectivity caused the loss of web pages.

Throughout the week, I asked for the DB server to be rebooted and was told
that Wednesday that some requested upgrades of the system had made database
connectivity from the web impossible.  The only option available to BII was to
hasten a planned migration to a new server.

I asked that the move be made as quickly as possible, but that the jbrain.com
domain be left pointing to the old site, since email and FTP were functioning
without incident.

Unfortunately, he site did not like to be operated in this fashion, so on June
12, we made the decision to move the entire site over to the new system.  I
revamped the scripts for the mail system the following Monday, but I noted
that email was slow to arrive and too little was arriving.  Finally, after two
weeks of poring over scripts and configurations, I concluded that the problem
must be with our ISP.

After some discussion with the ISP, they noted that they had not moved the
domain name mail.jbrain.com with our site.  All mail to mail.jbrain.com was
thus disappearing into thin air.  On June 30, the mail.jbrain.com domain was
reinstated for our use, and I revisited the scripts and updated some of them.

Last weekend, the site got caught in a mail loop at 9:20 July 4.  I did not
notice this problem until this afternoon.  As such. some email may not have
made it to the list from Friday morning to this afternoon.  However, I have
fixed the mail loop problem (caused by the email system emailing to itself) to
prevent it from reoccurring.  I have had very stable reports from the system,
and the mail loop problem was a minor glitch to be overcome.  To be safe, I
would suggest continuing to ave copies of important list exchanges for another
week or so, but I expect the system will return to its low key self from this
point forward.

As always, we will attempt to remedy problems as soon as they are brought to
our attention.  We thank you for using these services, and we hope to return
the web and FTP sites to operation in the near future.

Please accept our apologies for any problems this service interruption has
caused.  We cannot state often enough that we strive to provide reasable
uptime for our services, and such lengthy outages are never excusable.  I have
spoken about this incident to my ISP, and will attempt to convince them that
this cannot happen again.

Back to your regularly scheduled email traffic.

Jim Brain
Brain Innovations, Inc.

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