Colleagues.... ANL is part of ESNet and this outage described below will affect many if not all of ANL's links to the outside world. Below is part of the message describing the problem if your interested. Nestor ================================================= From: "James F. Leighton" <[email protected]> Subject: URGENT: Major Qwest/ESnet outage Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailing-List: <[email protected]> X-Loop: [email protected] Precedence: list Status: This message is to give you the earliest notice possible of a planned total outage of the Qwest 550 ATM backbone, upon which ESnet rides. The outage is planned to start at 7PM PST, tomorrow, 23 Mar, and conclude within 10 hours. IT WILL TAKE DOWN ESSENTIALLY ALL OF ESNET DURING THAT TIME!! The driving event is an error in the Lucent ATM switches that Qwest is using to supply services to ESnet. This "bug" causes an event called a cascading re-route, whereby all of the PVCs (virtual connections) in the ATM backbone are re-routed caused massive changes in latency and packet loss. We have been hit with this event several times, the most recent was twice this last week-end. The scheduled downtime is to be used to reload all of the high-end 550 Lucent ATM switches with new code. The procedure advised by Lucent is to take all the switches off-line during this reload, estimated to take 10 hours. Clearly we (ESnet) are very unhappy about this and have pushed for a less ugly solution or at least more notice - i.e. delay the outage. Qwest claims they have no options and must move forward - they have deployed people on airplanes, coordinated schedules, shipped parts, notified other customers, etc. I was just notified about this late yesterday afternoon and had hoped to push for a better solution, but was unable to do so in this morning's conference call. So I am sending this notice based on what I know at the moment. I anticipate this may have serious implications for some sites, so would ask the ESnet Site Coordinators to forward this information as quickly as possible to allow people to undertake whatever advance preparations they can. Needless to say I am extremely unhappy about this situation, but at this point I think our choice is a scheduled (with very short notice) outage, or face the likelihood of an unscheduled outage with no advance notice, and without the resources available that this event will have. As soon as we are able to do further planning, I will keep you up-to-date with and additional pertinent information. JFL =========================================== Dr. Nestor J. Zaluzec Materials Science Division Building 212 Argonne National Lab 9700 S. Cass Ave Argonne, Illinois 60439 USA Tel: 630-252-7901, Fax: 630-252-4798 Email: [email protected] =========================================== TPMLab: http://tpm.amc.anl.gov MMSite: http://www.amc.anl.gov =========================================== The box said ... "This program requires Win 95/98/NT or better..." So I bought a G3 Mac ! ===========================================