MPC Status Page: Archive (2003 July)

Recent problems are listed elsewhere. Index of other older problems..

Older Enhancements and Resolved Problems

• Modification to ACKing procedure

  2003 July 31: 15:43. The procedure that sends out the acknowledgements has been modified to include a "junk" rating (the percentage of the submitted message that does not consist of observations or observational/e-mail header material). Low "junk" ratings are good, high "junk" ratings are bad. Please pay attention to your ACK messages!

• Possible local network disruption

  2003 July 23: 19:18. We have been informed that the Computation Facility intends to upgrade its LAN routers on Saturday July 26 between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. All traffic will be rerouted to the backup router. No interruptions are anticipated but there may be brief periods of instability.

• E-mail disruption

  2003 July 11: 09:36. We have been informed that the Computation Facility intends to replace the current cfa.harvard.edu computer at 7:45 a.m. on July 16. The downtime will be approximately 30-60 minutes. SMTP connections will fail during this period, but mail should queue up on the sending computer and they should be sent when the new machine is brought on-line.

• SCULLY downtime

  2003 July 10: 16:15. The troublesome fan on SCULLY is getting worse. We have called for service to replace the fan. The downtime will be as short as possible and will probably occur in the late morning of July 11.
  • The shutdown occurred at 10:55.
  • The system was restarted at 11:25.

• SCULLY downtime

  2003 July 8: 12:40. We had to take the webserver down at short notice to localize a worrying noise, fearing that a disk drive might be failing. It turns out that one of the fans is the problem.
  • Normal operation was restored at 12:50.

• Web Defacement Contest disruption?

  2003 July 6: 13:00. It appears that the recently-announced web defacement contest has started. Network traffic appears to be substantially impacted. The CF webserver appears not be responding, but the MPC mirror pages on SCULLY are active and responding (albeit slowly) to user requests.
  • 16:53. Internal access to the CF webserver has been restored.
  • 17:21. We are informed that the CF lost NIS earlier today and this affected CF-based web services. They have not given us the reasons for this loss of NIS.

• Accessing Comets with Minor-Planet Designations

  2003 July 4: 21:40. A user reported that requesting an ephemeris for 2003 KV2 returned a stack dump. This object was originally designated as a minor planet but is now P/2003 KV2. The options are to simply return a meaningful error message indicating that the minor planet designation has been deleted, indicate that the object is now comet such-and-such, or quietly change the minor-planet designation into a comet designation and continue.
  • Updated code was put on-line at 23:30 (it would have been earlier but the Boston fireworks needed watching...) that removes the stack-dump problem and transparently converts the designation into the appropriate cometary designation.

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