Subject: IETF Website Outage

From: Alexa Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 May 2008 12:41:18 -0700

As many of you know, the IETF website was recently unavailable for
approximately 6 1/2 hours -- the time between 11:40pm, May 7th, and 6:15am,
May 8th, Pacific Time.

Many of you in Europe attempted to notify us of the outage and were unsure
of how to reach us, or what number to call. Thank you to everyone who
attempted to notify us, and I apologize for the fact that the process was
more confusing and time-consuming than it should have been.

We are taking a number of immediate steps to clarify the process, and to
make sure that any future outages are brief. Namely:

1) We are implementing an email notification system, which will then notify
the IT staff immediately if an outage occurs. This has actually been in the
works for some time but now, with the recent outage, it has been moved to
top priority. 

2) In case the email notification doesn't work properly for some reason, we
are also setting up an emergency IT hotline be to used to notify the AMS IT
department, whatever the hour. This number will be activated within the next
24 hours and I will distribute the phone number to the entire community as
soon as I have it available.

3) This morning we boosted our remote management capabilities, thereby
broadening our ability to respond to any issue from outside the office.

For those of you who are concerned about why the outage occurred in the
first place, it appears at this stage that the server crashed because of
memory management issues (it ran out of memory) and it appears the memory
issues were caused by a flood of mail (overnight spam) causing a huge
increase in TMDA activity.

So, our preliminary understanding is that the TDMA recently put in place
overloaded the server and brought it down. We are now looking into ways to
limit TMDA activity so that this is not an issue moving forward.

As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.

Regards,
Alexa

-----------
Alexa Morris / Executive Director / IETF
48377 Fremont Blvd., Suite 117, Fremont, CA  94538
Phone: +1.510.492.4089 / Fax: +1.510.492.4001
Email: [email-masked]

Managed by Association Management Solutions (AMS)
Forum Management, Meeting and Event Planning
www.amsl.com <http://www.amsl.com/>

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