Outage?

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Alex Beamish wrote:

> On 11/20/06, William O'Higgins Witteman <william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>
> wrote:
>>
>>  Is there any explanation for the list outage last week?  I assume there
>>  was an outage because I only got two emails from the list between the
>>  14th and this morning, when I got over 50, and Gmane seemed to agree
>>  with me.  Or am I just crazy ;-)
>>
>>  (shut up, shut up, they'll hear you)
>
>
> True story: I once dealt with a network provider whose service was a little
> spotty; one day, all of my transactions were being 'lost' -- at the network
> level I'd get an ACK that they'd been received, then .. nothing (I should
> have received either a response or a timeout). When I followed up, the
> sysadmin told me the transaction was probably delayed because of 'snow on
> the lines'.
>
> I paused to consider explaining to her on how many levels she might be
> wrong, then decided that someone who was trying to use that excuse for a
> network problem was either a) not really equipped to help me solve the
> problem or b) pulling my leg. I decided the best approach was just to accept
> that story and wait for the network service to return -- allowing her to
> save face, and allowing me to retain my sanity.
>
> So .. maybe there were, like, birds on the wire going to the mail list
> server, that allowed it to receive mail but not forward mail?

     Those are pigoens, and they are only trained to take messages
     *to* the server!

-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                      <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
    ===================================================================
    Author:
    Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists