cipherpunk mail at Netcom.com

[Bill Frantz]

At 10:06 PM 2/4/96 -0800, Norman Hardy wrote:
>The list of addressees is made from the "From" fields that include
>"netcom.com" in CP mail that appeared on the CP list Tuesday and Wednesday
>last week. I have received no CP mail since then. Have you?

Now that dam seems to have broken (I have received over 250 messages in the
last four hours), perhaps I can ask, "What Happened?".

I, along with Norm and Lucky received no Cypherpunks traffic for about a
week from Februrary 1 to February 7.  During this period, we could not get
response from majordomo at toad.com.  I asked a friend in the east to ping
toad.com and request "help" from majordomo at toad.com.  He did and reported
no problems with either test.

I have sent a request to Netcom support for help with this problem, but
their automatic responder says the have a 2 week backlog of email! :-(. 
Perhaps I will get some information from them in a few weeks.

I have two questions: (1) Did people who are not at netcom.com or
ix.netcom.com experience this outage?  (2) Did people who ARE at netcom.com
or ix.netcom.com receive the normal level of traffic during this period? 
Please respond by private email and I will summarize for the list.

I my more paranoid moments, I wonder if this a practice denial of service
attack.  In any case, perhaps this post will explain some of the strange
posts we have been sending to cypherpunks this last week.  My appologies
for the noise.


-----------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz                   Periwinkle  --  Computer Consulting
(408)356-8506                 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz at netcom.com             Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA