[Freeciv] The Status of the List

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Freeciver,

On Thursday night at about 9:00 PM, the server for complete.org (which runs
your mailing lists) lost connectivity.  The colocation facility had a
billing misunderstanding with their upstream, and got cut off.  In fact,
they are still down.  In a nasty twist of fate, the backup MX and DNS for
this zone went down shortly after my host did (totally unrelated incident).

As it became apparent on Friday that this problem was not going to be
resolved quickly, I set up a new server at a far better location (see the
update site below for info on why it will be more stable).  The new server
was activated this morning and I have been working for nearly 12 hours to
restore services from the last off-site backup 10 days ago, migrate DNS to
the new servers, etc.

At this time, the Freeciv mailing lists have been restored to operational
status for *SOME* people.  Some people will continue to get bounced messages
or DNS errors for the next 12 to 24 hours as the updated DNS information
propogates.  If you see this message, but cannot send messages to the
FreeCIV lists, this is probably the case for you.  There is nothing I can do
about this, although if you run your own server you can try restarting bind.

In all, it took only 48 hours to go from server-down emergency to
replacement in place, which if I do say so myself is not a bad record :-)

At this time, the list archives are down and will remain so until I can get
access to the data for the 10 days between the time the server was last
backed up offsite and today.  Please bear with me as I work to restore all
services.

I have created a site for the status of service restoration at
http://www.complete.org/.  If you cannot access that page, please try
http://198.78.66.183/.  That page also has much more detailed coverage of
the reasons behind the outage and why the new datacenter is much better.

Thanks,
John Goerzen

-- 
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>                       www.complete.org