Prairienet downtime

[Ron Berry]

I have occaisionally experienced slowness and inaccessibility of prairienet.
The slowness is sometimes just due to peak traffic, but there is a problem
that they are working on described in the following post:


>
>For the past several days the Prairienet computer has suffered from
>sudden downtime, lasting from several minutes to a few hours.  This
>message explains what's going on.
>
>First:  We have a temporary fix in place that should reduce downtime
>to less than 5 minutes.  Unfortunately, when downtime does occur you WILL
>be kicked off of Prairienet, and will most likely lose whatever
>you were working on.
>
>
>The problem:  We recently upgraded to a new version of the Sun
>operating system, version 4.1.4.  We are experiencing a problem
>where the networking hardware suddenly becomes inoperative,
>which prevents the Prairienet computer ("firefly") from communicating
>with the outside world.
>
>
>In October, we received and installed a Sun system patch for the
>Ethernet interface (where the problem is happening), which solved
>a similar problem we were having at that time.
>
>
>Unfortunately, no such patch has yet been released for the 4.1.4
>version of the SunOS system.
>
>We do have full technical support to help to solve this problem.
>With luck, we will get a fast response to put a patch into
>place.
>
>Sorry for this problem.  We wanted to make Prairienet users
>aware of it, and let you know that we are doing what we can
>to get a fix in place quickly.
>
>
>Note, for the curious:  The temporary fix is to restart
>the Ethernet interface every 5 minutes.  We are concerned that
>restarting more frequently might result in creating other problems,
>as the interface is generally started only once, when the computer
>is rebooted.
>
>  -- The Prairienet systems staff
>
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Ron Berry, RPT (Registered Piano Technician)
ronberry@iquest.net

Check out the Piano Page at http://www.prairienet.org/arts/ptg/homepage.html
for some great information and links about pianos!
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