On Wed, 22 Jan 1992 21:13:50 CST Jacqueline Nicholson said:
>One of our listowners reported that no mail is being sent out for the
>list he owns.  Apparently, no one has received any postings since some time
>during the holidays.  It's now working but I'd like to know what caused the
>problem.
 
If you cannot find an obvious fault in your server (like someone having done
a HOLD <listname> or some similar trick), I'd suggest you explore your link
surroundings.
 
A few years back, when I was at TECMTYVM, everything was working fine & dandy
until our neighbors at Rice completed a nodename change from RICECSVM to
RICEVM1, after a six month period of maintaining RICECSVM as an alias.
 
This was most unfortunate, since the folks at an intervening node between
RICEVM1 and TRINITY hadn't the faintest idea of what 'network administration'
meant (the guy who had done all the connecting & setup had left a few years
earlier) and they hadn't updated their RSCS tables for over two years.
This meant that all files from TRINITY to RICEVM1 were summarily sent to the
black hole.
 
Since TRINITY was the nearest backbone peer for TECMTYVM (main backbone
peer for all of Mexico), suddenly all traffic from Mexico stopped,
affecting over 10 peered & non-peered lists.
 
Moral from this story: be wary of every monthly routing table update. You
never know when you'll end up connected thru a node with brain-dead
administrators...
 
Juan