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Index of Subjects Hi Jim. Userhelp is manned by volunteers and these volunteers are not the same people who administer Chebucto. There are two of us currently administering Chebucto, me for the simpler tasks and account admin and a fellow named Johnathan who is the true sysadmin. For the past year and a half, Chebucto has not had sufficient funds to pay for two staff people so Johnathan's sysadmin tasks are being done on a volunteer basis by him in addition to his own fulltime and then some job elsewhere. We've had two kinds of email glitch over the past few months. Our main mail server, which we are in the process of replacing with new gear, locks up every now and again, and one of the spam filtering servers can lock up and need restarting. The main mail server glitch requires one of us to physically come into the office and reboot the machine. Typically these outages now last less than thirty minutes - the time it takes to get the page and get to the office. The second type of glitch is much harder to detect - this past weekend for example I too did not have missing mail and I am on several high traffic non-Chebucto mailing lists. So I like Richard noticed nothing wrong. I did have a couple of emails from users that there may be an issue and saw that one of the filtering servers had been restarted early Monday with a very small queue of mail from it delivered within an hour of the restart. In other words, Johnathan had detected the issue and corrected it as soon as he had. The spam filtering servers are pretty robust so they pull this sort of trick infrequently. As to what can we do about things, we're doing what we can. We have spent a great deal of money on new twin mail servers. These are in the process of being configured and should allow us trouble free mail for years to come. The spam filtering server issues will also be addressed in time. Most of our issues are of short duration so by the time we were to get a notice up about an issue, it's usually been resolved and generates confusion where some people think a resolved problem is still active (with all the fun that entails). There could be better communication between userhelp volunteers and system adminstrators but the issue there is adding to the workload of an already hard worked volunteer. So we carry on with what we have. You now know more about Chebucto mail than you probably wanted to but it's important to understand that we're always doing everything we can for our users and that each year we're having to deliver more services, and more reliability with fewer and fewer resources. On Tue, 23 Aug 2011, Jim Rice wrote: > Hi Richard > > The problem resolved itself shortly after I sent this message. Yes, there > had been a complete absence of any incoming mail for at least 24 hours and > this would involve messages from multiple ISPs and geographic areas. The > same thing happened back on July 5 - surely you are aware of these sorts of > problems? Ed responded at that time. > > Once the problem clears I start getting a bunch of messages from the > previous day all arriving at once. > > Perhaps the mail you were receiving was all from other chebucto users? When > this happens from time to time, mail continues to work within Chebucto. > > I get emails from regular, daily sources - eBay, Spin Records UK - as well > as notes from clients in Toronto and my wife at work. When the mail stops, > it is pretty obvious to me. Add to that the fact that once the mail starts > up again I get notes arriving that are clearly dated the day before - twice > as many eBay notes for example. One dated "today" and a similar one dated > "yesterday". > > I'm a little horrified that userhelp would not be aware of these periodic > problems that have been happening for years. > > Jim > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Richard Bonner" <ak621@chebucto.ns.ca> > To: "Jim Rice" <jrice@chebucto.ns.ca> > Cc: "Chebucto User help" <userhelp@chebucto.ns.ca> > Sent: August 23, 2011 11:44 AM > Subject: Re: No incoming mail > > >> >> On Mon, 22 Aug 2011, Jim Rice wrote: >> >>> Just in case you are not aware, there once again seems to be a >>> problem with incoming mail. I am not speaking of problems connecting >>> to the mail server; I can connect just fine. Once connected, there >>> has been no incoming mail since sometime on the weekend. It appears >>> that incoming mail is not reaching the chebucto mail server. >>> >>> Jim >> >> *** Hi, Jim! >> >> Long time, no speak. (-: >> >> I have gotten e-mail as normal on all three of my CCN accounts. >> >> Have you not received e-mail from persons that said they sent >> some? If so, ny chance are they all with the same ISP? >> >> Richard Bonner >> Chebucto User Help >> > > > >
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