Author: admin

Thu Feb 5 22:21:40 PST 1998 — At 5am Friday morning we’ll be here with the crane again putting up the new Trane 5 ton air conditioner. See earlier MOTD entries for for info on this upgrade. -Dane

Thu Feb 5 22:17:07 PST 1998 — We again spent a large amount of time this evening returning fast busy (reorder) tones to customers. I’ve opened up a new repair ticket with PacBell, and I think we’ve isolated one small configuration problem which is having a big effect. The details: When the analog hunt group (522-1001) fills up, it’s supposed to forward on to the X2 hunt group (522-1002). When the X2 gear fills up, it’s supposed to forward on to our new PRI gear (522-1003). When the PRI gear was deployed last week, we tested the last X2 number (547-3309) and it did indeed reach the PRI equipment if it was busy. Great! However, we found tonight that when the number before that (547-3308) is busy, users get a reorder tone! It sounds like there is something wrong with the way that 3308 is configured, and Fred at PacBell is working on it right now. We’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, if you’re frustrated with all the reorder tones, you can dial 522-1003 and you should have no troubles. -Dane

Thu Feb 5 22:00:08 PST 1998 — News services were in a deferred posting mode for a few hours this evening while we made minor repairs on the spool filesystem. This goes back to the crash we had at 14:47 today. All posts which users make when we’re in a mode like this are injected into the Usenet system as soon as the filesystem are offline, so both posting and reading behaves the way it should. -Dane

Thu Feb 5 14:55:25 PST 1998 — About 16 ports in our analog hunt group failed to issue login prompts, and we’ve reset the equipment. This yeilded timeouts during attempts to login for some users between 1pm and 2pm today. There’s just too much odd stuff happening today! -Dane

Thu Feb 5 14:47:23 PST 1998 — Our news server crashed and was offline for 10 minutes. There were no filesystem problems, and it’s back online normally now. We’ve had an ongoing problem with occasional crashes with this system, and we’re planning a bios upgrade, as a OS upgrade didn’t fix the trouble. -Dane

Thu Feb 5 14:44:58 PST 1998 — We’ve completed X2 deployment on our new USR Total Control Enterprise Hub. This equipment serves 522-1003, plus overflow from 522-1002 and 522-1001. Until this deployment was finished, X2 users calling 522-1002 could have ended up on equipment which didn’t support X2. -Dane

Wed Feb 4 07:45:51 PST 1998 — PacBell has converted almost all of our digital X2 digital circuits to the new ‘NI-2’ switch protocol. It appears PB overlooked 6 phone lines during the conversion; the other 186 lines were moved without incident. Those 6 lines are still in service, albeit with the old switch protocol — we’re working with PB to complete the transition. -Scott

Wed Feb 4 06:28:18 PST 1998 — PacBell had some problems getting the X2 hunt group configured. However, it’s happening right now! X2 is offline while the switch operator runs her transactions on our ports, and should be back up by 7am. -Scott

Wed Feb 4 14:04:55 PST 1998 — Pacific Bell has pretty much completed the transition to the new switch protocol, and we no longer have problems with calls from caller-ID blocked users being refused with a fast busy signal. This project took a week to push through PacBell’s monolithic paper pushing organism, and we’re not very pleased about the handling of the whole situation. The good news is that users no longer need to dial ‘*82,’ to get through to the affected equipment! This should mean less of these false fast busy signals (actually a reorder tone), and that’s great! We’re tracking a number of other issues in our dialup group, and we’ll keep you posted here as we find solutions. -Dane

Tue Feb 3 18:34:07 PST 1998 — We’ve ordered four more PRI circuits which will be installed on February 26th. These circuits add 92 ports to our current capacity of about 790 total ports. They will be served by another new USR Total Control Enterprise Hub, offering v.34+, X2 and ISDN. -Dane