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W4DPH > SAT 28.09.03 13:16l 63 Lines 2832 Bytes #-7471 (0) @ AMSAT
BID : ANS-271.04
Read: GUEST
Subj: AMSAT.ORG servers recover from outage
Path: DB0ZKA<DB0SIP<OE9XPI<OE7XLR<OE2XOM<OE2XUM<OE5XBR<ON0AR<ON0AR<LU6DTS<
W4JAX<W4DPH
Sent: 030928/1125Z @:W4DPH.#TPA.FL.USA.NOAM #:6362 [CLW] FBB $:ANS-271.04
From: W4DPH@W4DPH.#TPA.FL.USA.NOAM
To : SAT@AMSAT
AMSAT News Service Bulletin 271.04 From AMSAT HQ
SILVER SPRING, MD. September 28, 2003
To All RADIO AMATEURS
BID: $ANS-271.04
As I'm sure most of you noticed, the AMSAT.ORG system was more or
less broken starting around 1903 UTC on Friday, 19 September. I'm sorry
for the inconvenience. To the best of my knowledge, all systems have
now been restored to normal operation as of about 2340 UTC on Tuesday,
23 September.
The problem began with the installation of an emergency security
update to protect the system against a recently-discovered potential
attack. Security updates like these are installed all the time on all
well-administered Unixish systems, and help to keep the system under
control and working smoothly. This time, something went wrong, and
the resulting updated system was not able to run the email program
(sendmail) that handles all incoming and outgoing email. All mail
aliases, mailing lists, and email servers (like majordomo)
immediately stopped working.
The next day at 16:45 UTC, sendmail was fixed and mail alias relaying
was restored. However, in the process of fixing sendmail, some other
things went wrong, which prevented the mailing lists, majordomo, the
mail alias creation and modification web pages, and several other
things from working. Incidentally, this also prevented me personally
from accessing my own email or having any remote access to help fix
the system. Between me being locked out (and out of town) and the
sysadmin being mostly unavailable over the weekend (and busy once the
workweek resumed), each step toward getting this mess straightened
out took a lot longer than usual.
In theory, the updating scheme we use has now been fixed and future
updates should go smoothly. In practice, I'm keeping my fingers
crossed for next time.
Messages that were sent during the outages were either bounced back
to the sender or just plain lost. If you sent messages to mailing
lists on amsat.org and didn't see them come back, you may want to
send them again. If in doubt, you can check the archives at
http://www.amsat.org/amsat/archive/index.html to see if the message
was processed. The archive contains exactly those messages that went
out to the mailing list subscribers.
Your mailing list subscriptions on amsat.org have not been changed.
They should be working now.
If you subscribe to mailing lists from other systems using your
amsat.org mail alias address, you may have been automatically dropped
from those lists during the outage. You can probably just
resubscribe. I urge you to resubscribe using your direct email
address, if at all possible, to avoid this problem in the future.
If you find anything still broken, please let me know by email at
kb5mu@amsat.org
[ANS thanks Paul, KB5MU, for the above information]
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