SYIX.COM - NEWS@SYIX V4N4 |
***************************************** * * * NEWS @ SYIX * * * ***************************************** Aug 26, 1998 Vol 4 No 4 WELCOME! Welcome to the not very often edition of News@SYIX, a quick newsletter that your favorite internet company is supposed to get into your mailbox once a month, and your favorite system administrator fails to write that often. Whoops. Back issues, and this issue (when I get it posted) are found at A WEDDING! Wow! Dave is getting married! On Aug 30 your friendly System Admin and local Internet
Access Provider Dave Overton is getting married to a wonderful woman that has tolerated
all my silliness over the last 6 years or so. Terri and I are saying our vows on Sunday,
and I will be gone from the office until Thursday enjoying a short break to pretend that I
have a SUPPORT EMAIL If you have a question to ask us, and you want a fairly quick reply, please use the online form or send your email to "support@syix.com". This will generally get a quicker reply than personal mail sent to anyone here. Really. The online support form is at: http://www.syix.com/feedback.htm ARGH. What a July/Aug we have had. A QUICK rundown.... July 15. System Fails between here and San Francisco. It is a major outage, one caused by a Router in San Francisco, but it takes them 3 hours to find it and fix it (during prime time even. July 16. After Number 1 is fixed, our T1 circuit is magically reduced from 1.544Mbs to 384Kbs of available bandwidth. PacBell denies anything is wrong, even goes so far as to say its NORMAL for that, we are using it too much etc. Funny, it was fine on the 14th. July 23. DAYS have passed, (16th to the 23rd) and 1/2 of the T1 bandwidth returns (the incoming half) Still limited to low bandwidth on the outgoing side, but little effect on anyone except the people we share usenet news with. Things are moving again, but we are less than happy with it still July 27 FINALLY, something good happens, we ordered a NEW T1 circuit from Qwest around the beginning of June, and its installed and working! Its a FULL T1, point to point circuit, not a shared "Frame Relay T1" like we were (and everyone else is still) using. We get the joy of paying for this one by the MILE. Cool huh? Its 30% faster than the previous T1 circuit, and we are VERY happy!!! Life is good again. July 29. PacBell calls to tell me they have finally figured out what they need to fix on the old T1. I get to say that I DON'T CARE!!! Believe me, I enjoyed that phone call. Aug 7. We install new code in our Terminal Servers (modem sorta things) that you call call into that allows V90 to work for all modem types. Very cool, that V90 stuff, more later on that. Aug 8. New modem code causes ONE Terminal Server to lockup. Ugh. It was not the first one at least, it was the second one. If you called during the downtime and connected to that server, you would get authenticated and connected, but not able to go anything or go anywhere. At least we have 5 of these running, so it wasn't too bad (except if you were one of the ones hitting that bad terminal server of course). None of our monitoring programs caught this one, and nobody noticed it until almost 12 hours later. Many of you never saw this one, even though it happened during prime time. Aug 14. PacBell decided to upgrade the switch down at their central office in Yuba City, and not tell anyone. In the middle of the night of course. During the upgrade the turned off our PRI circuits (9 trunk lines we bring in your calls on). Nice of them? After appropriate yelling, we got it all back up in the morning. Monitor program was modified to catch the Aug 8 error, but not this one. ARGH. NEVER figured they would just flat turn off all of them at once (that's 207 phone lines) Aug 19. PacBell turns off 2 of our PRI circuits, this time nobody notices (except us of course) because we have excess capacity and things still work on the extra systems. At the time of this writing, 24 hours after they turned it off, they still can't figure out how to turn it back on. (finally got it back online around 3pm on the 20th) I hate PacBell. Well, it does prove that I am headed in the right direction with redundancy around here. At this rate, I will have 2 of everything running here. Aug 20. What else can PacBell do to us this month? Except for the very first outage way up there on July 15, ALL OF these failures were due to PacBell errors. And we have no alternatives. I love monopolies don't you? Total Downtime for our Internet connection in July/Aug was 3 hours It seemed like a LOT more. These items exceeded all the downtime we have experienced in
the last 3 years. All in one month. Either we are badly jinxed lately, or we are looking
forward to YEARS of stable service in the future (used up all the bad luck at once) Or
PacBell is intentionally trying to force us out of the internet business, but I would
never think that. QWEST Communications This is a fairly new, but WELL established Backbone operator, with the FASTEST backbone
network on the market. Really. Its VERY fast. We are directly connected to their central
office in Denver now, and they in turn are directly connected to many of the places YOU
want to go. Qwest has been also selling major circuits to many of the major internet
companies, so we are in a win/win situation, as they sell more circuits, we get
"closer" electronically to many of the greatest websites online. Cool huh? V.90 MODEMS This is driving many of you, and us NUTS. We have gone through 3 or 4 revisions of the V90 software on this end in the last 2 weeks. Really, they have kept changing it over and over again, trying to get it right. At this time, it is SUPPOSED to be compatible with ALL the V90 modems, but many of them are still having problems. And worse, some of the 28.8/33.6 modems are having problems now where there were none before!!! ARGH! A couple of suggestions culled from different mailing lists I read are... 1. 28.8/33.6 connection problems: Add 3 or 4 commas after the phone number, this makes the modem NOT hear the new V90 tones, and usually helps it connect better. Experiment with the commas. Be warned, they might get this problem fixed in the future and the commas will not be necessary, but they shouldn't hurt anything. 2. V90 that isn't: Some V90 modems default to using things other than V90 to operate, like if it was a x2, and you flash it to V90, it still tries to use x2, no matter what you want it to do. This is coming from USR Winmodems mostly. No fix yet. 3. V90 that isn't, part 2: Was a K56flex, now a V90. Still using K56flex to connect, this is pure silliness, but there are command line "switches" you can add to force a V90 connect to many of these. Look at the info from your modem manufacturer. V90 sounds FUNNY. Has 2 little "boings" that occur right before the connection is made. Really. If you hear it once, you will never forget it. The boings are the indication that v90 is being started, and without them, you are not negotiating a V90 connection. NORMALLY V90 connects faster than K56 or x2, and has silly connection speeds like 47666 and 50667 and things like that. Make sure you have the LATEST flash code for your modem, the manufacturers are releasing code often, as things get closer to the actual "standard" being released. One of these days this will all be a bad memory, and this V90 junk will be over, but in the mean time, if you want to play in the V90 world, you have to put up with all sorts of nonsense at this time. BEST PART? MANY of you are having NO problems with V90, so its not as bad as I make it
sound. AN EXPLANATION We have been asked a few times why our system is down all the time, and "Nobody
else says they have this many problems". Everyone has problems, all the companies
from the smallest to the largest. Some have big enough problems that it makes the national
news. We are not ashamed of our problems, and we are forthright enough to admit to things
that happen around here. I have NEVER used the excuse "it must be your computer"
when things don't work. Many times it IS "your" computer, but if WE are broke,
we admit it. Phone lines go down, equipment reboots for no reason, servers quit serving,
all sorts of things happen. On a typical week, we catch dozens of little errors that never
create a problem, RAM that has decided to start failing, Harddrives that quit harddriving,
all sorts of things. We have nothing critical running on Win95/98 for the same reason that
you have to reboot your computer once in a while, its too unstable for our use. When
something happens around here, its handled immediately and quickly. The only stuff we are
unable to fix is outside our network, things downstream from us, and things caused by
PacBell. And I think we do a fine job! Anyway, SYIX isn't always broke, we just always
admit to it... Macintosh Modems!!! Direct Quote from "http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/index.html#modem" "Modem Speedup Tip?: Just go under the modem control panel and select Farallon Netopia 56K and watch it fly. on apples CORRECT modem setting I was getting 2k-3k, on many other settings I was getting 1k-2.5k, now I am getting 4k-5.5k, and it loads most pages 3 times faster according to my stop watch. its fast, verry fast, faster than my friends isdn it seems. ps 3com impact isdn 56k works best w/global village platinum I'm trying it as well on the PB G3 internal modem. It connected fine but did not report a connect rate - however it does seem fast and I have not had one disconnect so far!" Humm, maybe try it? It appears to work on the Imac also. Now for the interesting part of my newsletter!!! A few links! CLICKLIST I know you have all looked at this already, but I get so much feedback from it, I just had to tell you about it again. We setup a LARGE list of GOOD sites, categorized, that you can use to find things on the net. Check it out at: http://www.syix.com/members/clicklist.htm "NASA Researches WARP Drives" Not that this is important, but I found it interesting (too much Star Trek I think). http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm V90 Modems - More info. I know you have questions, as do I. Check this little list out. http://www.56k.com/buyer/v90upfaq.shtml FILE SEARCH This is a GREAT file search utility, with fast response, and this one is updated regularly. I use it almost daily, for all sorts of stuff online. If you need a file, this is the place to go first. SUPPORT FUNNIES To do this business, you have to have a great "help desk". We also have to be a bit deranged. Well, this site lets you see what WE think is funny! Check out it, its quite cute, and you will find many of the things here very familiar, and a few new ones to tickle your funny bone. http://helpdeskfunnies.cyberjuice.com Thanks once again for your support. SYIX appreciates the support of the community, we hope that you continue to support us, and let us do the things we do well! Thanks again! Dave Overton ***************************************** |