Re: archive system bug

On December 27th MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, where a
sizeable percentage of W3C's servers reside, had a planned power
outage.  

Power was restored after delays and electrical complications late
(EST) on the 28th.    

W3C suffered further complications where several machines, including
our primary nameserver, weren't restored until the 29th.  

During this outage pending list mail was collected on a backup mail
server in France. 

W3C uses an archive approval system for first time posters to W3C's
mailing lists as both a spam deterrent and to ensure the poster is
informed that their post will be archived publically and gives their
permission.

Portions of the archival approval system reside on a server that
utilizes a network filesystem mount and apparently the delay in
communication to W3C's secondary nameservers overseas resulted in
timeouts that prevented this mount from happening.   

This particular issue was not discovered as complications to W3C's
services from the outage were corrected until recently. 

The causes were diagnosed and corrected on the morning of January 2nd
and the archive approval system restored.  

On behalf of W3C's Systems Team please accept our apologies for the
confusion this may have caused.  These delayed comments will make it
to the archive once the posters, who will be notified again, give
their approval and will get the appropriate consideration from the
Patent Policy Working Group. 

-- 
Ted Guild <ted@w3.org>
W3C Systems Team
http://www.w3.org

Received on Thursday, 2 January 2003 13:30:15 UTC