[EHPweb] Reston Internet ouyage Sunday August 10

[Stan Silverman]

I ran across Dan Winkless (GIO) in the building 3 computer room this  
afternoon. He's based in New Mexico, but comes here to work on Natweb  
machines and Water Resource machines. He said he was alerted to the  
problem in Reston at his home early Sunday morning. He uses big  
brother (checking access to machines) but has connections both from  
outside the survey and internal. The internal network was still  
working so he assumed it was the ESN that had a problem and went back  
to sleep.

At around 9am Sunday, he got hold of the ESN person who said they  
knew about the problem and were trying their contact at the survey to  
get access to the problem area. Unfortunately, all they had was an  
office phone number for their contact, Rob Weitzel, (who wasn't at  
work at 9am on Sunday). Thus it took several more hours and phone  
calls to track down someone who could give them access to the problem  
location. The person that Dan spoke with at NOSC (ESN?) said he  
should probably get on the outage email list for ESN in case  
something similar happens in the future.

So, in the end, probably no one knows who to call, or how, or why.

Stan

On Aug 11, 2008, at 2:59 PM, Robert Simpson wrote:

> Hi Stan,
>
> What was Big Brother looking at that triggered caused it to issue an
> alert?  I noticed that the QDDS messages were out of sync on the
> various servers and thought it was a firewall problem.  Lien La looked
> and couldn't see any firewall issues.  At that point, I didn't know
> who to call next.
>
> I'll send you a Gary Welch message with a phone number for future use.
>
> Bob
>
>
> On Aug 11, 2008, at 2:20 PM, stan at bort.gps.caltech.edu wrote:
>
>>> Hi, is there some way that we can be informed upon any Reston
>>> outages?  Do
>>> you have some sort of monitoring software that checks for network
>>> activity
>>
>> I knew about this outage. Big Brother detected it and informed me.  
>> Not
>> that I could do anything about it, but it was good to at least  
>> know it
>> was going on.
>>
>> -- 
>> Stan Schwarz                | Extreme sports...offer "some kind of
>> physical
>> System Administrator        | analog to the thrill of installing
>> Linux or
>> USGS Pasadena Office        | other open-source operating systems."
>> http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov |           -Mikki Halpin, _The Geek
>> Handbook_
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