Subject: IETF Ticketing System Outage

From: Glen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 14:42:51 -0800

Dear IETF Community and Participants -

As many of you know, the IETF uses a ticketing system, known as "RT" and
operated by the Secretariat, to receive incoming requests for help from the
community and to manage and respond to those requests.

I am sorry to announce that there has been a partial RT outage over the
past 24 hours, during which time some requests sent to the Secretariat
might not have been delivered.

As you are all aware, there exists an ever-growing problem with
DMARC-related email rejections.  Many of you are starting to experience
this firsthand as your ISPs implement various blocking rules, and the
side-effects of those rules are felt.  Because of this, the Tools team, led
(in this effort) by Russ, Alexey and Henrik, are working to develop a way
of processing mail that solves this problem for all of our participants,
regardless of related ISP settings or rules.

To this end, a number of experiments are underway, and one of these
experiments has, unfortunately, caused the loss of some emails sent to the
IETF's Ticketing System ("RT").

Since not all emails and queues were impacted, we did not immediately
detect this problem.  However, once detected, we were able to fix it
quickly, and the RT system is back online now.  We now want to make sure
that any unresolved requests sent in by the community are handled and
resolved.

Whenever anyone sends an email to our RT system, at one of the
well-published addresses, such as IETF-Action, the RT system sends a reply
with a ticket number.  If you have emailed the ticketing system (or indeed
any IETF staff or service addresses in IETF domains) within the past 24
hours, and have not received a ticket number, or a response back from a
human, we ask that you please re-submit your request.  We understand that
this is an annoyance, but we want to ensure that nothing critical was lost.

We apologize for this inconvenience, and ask for your patience and
understanding with this issue as we all continue to work for a solution to
the challenges at hand.

Thank you,
Glen
--
Glen Barney
IT Director
AMS (IETF Secretariat)