======================= SSCC News, August, 1997 ======================= Inside this issue... VMS and UNIX Downtime August 12 and 13 WinCenter to be Rebooted during Wednesday Morning Downtimes Newly Installed UPS Keeps Computer Systems Up during Power Outages New Software - HLM and Acroread Warning about Overwriting Tapes Unintentionally WiscWorld Upgrade may Result in Temporary Outages August 2 E-mail in the SSCC -------------------------------------- VMS and UNIX Downtime August 12 and 13 -------------------------------------- All VMS computers will be down all day Tuesday, August 12, beginning at 8:00 a.m. in order to upgrade the operating system on EAGLE. All UNIX computers will be down all day Wednesday, August 13, beginning at 8:00 a.m. in order to reconfigure software on GUY. This downtime was scheduled to coincide with the ASA conference when many SSCC users will be away. There should be no interruption in e-mail services during this downtime. VMS users can forward their mail to UNIX before the VMS downtime. Contact the Consultant if you need assistance doing that. UNIX computers will be up and down throughout the day on August 13 so, with a little patience, UNIX users should be able to read and send e-mail. ----------------------------------------------------------- WinCenter to be Rebooted during Wednesday Morning Downtimes ----------------------------------------------------------- WinCenter will be rebooted on a weekly basis during the Wednesday morning downtimes. Rebooting will rid WinCenter of hung processes and other application error which degrades performance. The downtime should be very brief - probably no more than 5 or 10 minutes. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Newly Installed UPS Keeps Computer Systems Up during Power Outages ------------------------------------------------------------------ The Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) which was installed in the computer room earlier this summer has had quite a work out with all the recent thunder storms. So far, it has prevented the computers from losing power six times! ------------------------------- New Software - HLM and Acroread ------------------------------- Two new software packages have been installed over the past month. HLM version 4.01 is now available on WinCenter. HLM performs hierarchical linear and nonlinear modeling. Acroread version 3.0, software for viewing PDF files, is now available on Digital Unix 4.0. That means that it only runs on GUY. It became available just last week and was immediately installed. There are no plans to port Acroread to Digital Unix 3.2 and so Acroread will not work on the other Unix boxes until they are upgraded to 4.0. (Acroread has been available on SunOS computers for some time.) ----------------------------------------------- Warning about Overwriting Tapes Unintentionally ----------------------------------------------- Three tapes were inadvertently overwritten recently when a user specified the wrong tape numbers on a job that initialized the tapes. Unfortunately, the tape numbers specified belonged to someone else. Mistakes like these can usually be avoided if tape owners remember to do the following: 1) Initialize your tapes/3480s with at least the default protection of w:r. 2) Make a backup of any tape/3480 containing data that you cannot afford to lose. 3) Remove your tapes/3480s from the computer room when they are not in use. ---------------------------------------------------------- WiscWorld Upgrade may Result in Temporary Outages August 2 ---------------------------------------------------------- DoIT is planning to perform a major upgrade to the WiscWorld email system on August 2nd. The upgrade will increase the number of machines handling email from the current single machine to seven. During the upgrade, dialin to DoIT will not be affected, but changes to the WiscWorld database will not be possible. This includes forward changes, password changes, and new account activation. Email left on the WiscWorld server may not be accessible from Saturday, August 2nd, at 10am, until about eight hours later. ------------------ E-mail in the SSCC ------------------ In some ways the most "mission-critical" service that the SSCC provides its users is electronic mail. Over the last year the SSCC's email system, controlled by the Digital Unix server called duncan.ssc.wisc.edu, has sent out approximately 900,000 separate messages to 1,900,000 different recipients, an average of about 2,500 messages to 5,100 recipients per day, every day. 98.8% of these messages arrive within five minutes of being sent and 99.7% arrive within thirty minutes of being sent. The number of undelivered messages (aside from messages sent to incorrect addresses) totals only 0.018% of all messages. Cumulative Time to delivery %age percentage ==================== ===== ========== Less than one minute 95.61 95.61 1- 5 minutes 3.23 98.84 5-30 minutes 0.88 99.72 31-60 minutes 0.09 99.80 1- 2 hours 0.07 99.87 2-12 hours 0.06 99.93 12-24 hours 0.02 99.96 24-48 hours 0.02 99.98 More than 48 hours 0.004 99.982 Messages undelivered 0.018 100.000 When messages cannot be delivered immediately, they can stay in the mail queue for up to five days. After three days of non-delivery, a user is informed automatically that the message is still being held in case it can be delivered later. After five days the message is returned to sender as undeliverable. SSCC staff attempt to keep users informed when delivery of one of their messages is delayed. Occasionally users report that email they have sent to a destination outside the Co-op has not been received. We take these reports seriously and follow up on all of them. In almost every case, the cause of the delayed delivery, or non-delivery has been a problem at the destination site or at a "gateway" site (such as DoIT) over which we have SSCC staff have no control. However, when possible, we do notify mail administrators at problem sites of difficulties and this often speeds solutions. Providing reliable email service is one of SSCC's highest priorities. Please continue to keep us informed about messages that do not reach their intended destination in a timely way so that we can continue to improve email service.