CDR: Re: Re: ssz.com network trouble

[Bill Stewart]

At 10:07 AM 11/20/00 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
>
>Hi Bill,
>On Sat, 18 Nov 2000, Bill Stewart wrote:
>> I did a traceroute (well, mswindoze tracert, anyway), and got a 
>> "destination unreachable" from a machine at realtime.net in Austin.
>> SSZ has often been unreliable;
>
>Unreliable? 

The context of my message was "don't panic if you haven't been able
to connect to SSZ for the last few hours, it happens sometimes";
I wasn't saying "don't trust those unreliable bums" :-)

>We average six and eight month uptimes. And when the outages
>occur it has been either hardware failure or a service failure. 
>We average 2 hardware failures per year and it usualy(!) takes less than 4
>hours to have it replaced (not bad for off the shelf consumer equipment).
>...We usualy get about 4 service interruptions of
>some sort or another a month. They usualy last about 4 hours. 

I agree that's not bad for off the shelf equipment not located at
a heavy-duty colocation facility, though I thought you've also had
the occasional power hit take you down.   ISDN isn't the kind of thing
to use if you're paranoid about not having your connection flake
once in a while, but it's pretty good (if the price is right)
for a mostly-reliable service and is pretty good at self-recovery
if you've got a service provider with multiple dialin locations.

>> I think it's connected by ISDN, and it's raining down in Texas.
>
>Yes, we had a ISDN/Ethernet issue. Replacing the hardware with a suitable
>model was harder than expected, coudn't find anyone open with stock on
>Saturday.
>
>As to rain, 4in/hr is a tad more than a sprinkle junior.

Yup.  Telecom networks often get grouchy about that sort of thing,
especially when they're going out to your house or small business,
and I'd been guessing you were probably having that or a power problem.


				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
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