Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!apple!voder!pyramid!csg From: csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Disaster Planning Message-ID: <89249@pyramid.pyramid.com> Date: 28 Oct 89 18:45:33 GMT References: <103@farcomp.UUCP> <1195@atha.AthabascaU.CA> Reply-To: csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) Distribution: news Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA Lines: 28 In article <1195@atha.AthabascaU.CA> lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes: >The UUCP Mapping Project was also very much on the ball during the >earthquake. As sites were verified as non-operational, they were >marked as dead in the d.AProject file, and updates were forwarded >into comp.mail.maps on a regular basis. This allowed the well >connected sites to rapidly reconfigure their routing tables. Mel and I debated this privately, to no resolution. As a host that was never down, I took rather strong exception to being listed "DEAD" in the d.AProject file without anybody consulting me first. In fact, most of the hosts listed DEAD were never down at all. Mel's justification was that he generally wanted to reroute mail around the Bay Area. My point was that unless you list hosts that are actually down (sun.com was down, but not listed), and *only* hosts that are down, then it serves no purpose. >Of course, the mail had to eventually bottleneck *somewhere*. Exactly. Which is why the d.AProject changes were a well-intentioned mistake. All the changes did was cause mail to take longer, more circuitous routes -- and chew up even more of our precious phone bandwidth. There *is* one thing that we do that I'd like to suggest to other sites: all of our modems are set to quit if they don't get a dialtone within 5 seconds. That way, when the phones were most jammed, we placed a much smalled number of calls. (Pyramid's UUCP also logs call progress messages, so I could see the NO DIALTONE messages in LOGFILE. But that's just a warm fuzzy.)