Fri, 27 Jul 90 16:29:29 O
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EARN is presently suffering from a number of serious problems affecting
the delivery of files to european users:
1. The 3705 controller at CEARN is "dead". Austria, India and the UK are
disconnected, and the BSC line to Germany is also affected. I have not
been able to contact anybody at CERN who could take action on this; I
expect the problem to be solved by monday, but it is unlikely to
happen before that.
2. LISTSERV@CEARN presently has 2,000 files in its reader (this has been
steadily increasing during the week), which means very long delivery
delays for distribution lists.
3. LISTSERV@FRULM11 had over 6,000 files in its reader last friday; the
backlog is now almost gone, but the FRULM11 spool is full with a queue
of something like 1,600 files, the smallest one being 2,000 records.
This is the reason why this server is often not logged on, and this is
why the distribution of large postings to EARN is basically halted
until the situation improves. A 64k line for FRULM11 has already been
ordered, but it will probably not be delivered before october.
One of the causes of the last 2 problems is the "duplicate list posting"
problem that we started experiencing about 3 weeks ago. A broken RSCS or
MAILER at some site which we have unfortunately not yet been able to
identify yet is sometimes resending an unpredictable amount of copies of
the very same mail message (from 2 to 200); you can imagine what happens
when these messages hit a popular distribution list like INFO-VAX. A
LISTSERV fix for release 1.6e (16E-003O FIX from LISTSERV@SEARN) was made
available to prevent the distribution of such duplicate postings, but
those which are already "in the pipe" cannot be eliminated; in addition,
not all servers are running with this fix yet, and a significant
proportion of EARN servers do not run release 1.6.
Another cause is a swiss node administrator who generated around 1,000
netwide signoff jobs for deleted student accounts. A third cause is the
increasing popularity of the BITFTP server, which unfortunately does
nothing to help the RSCS backlogs in the north of France. There are
probably other causes which I have not yet found out about.
Eric
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