Electrolite: Hello out there?

November 22, 2003

Hello out there? Our email provider, the usually-reliable Panix, seems to have been down all day, so we won’t have seen anything sent to us since late last night. If it’s a real emergency, leave a comment, I guess. [02:21 PM]

Welcome to Electrolite's comments section.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

Comments on Hello out there?:

Vicki ::: (view all by) ::: November 22, 2003, 10:51 PM:

I ssh'd in a little while ago, and the message of the day (posted at 16:55) was that mail was delayed, and they were trying to figure out why and fix it.

My email seems to now be working.

Erik V. Olson ::: (view all by) ::: November 22, 2003, 11:44 PM:

I'm sort of afraid of a situation that would leave the very clueful Panix folks confused about why email was slow.

No. I'm very afraid.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: November 23, 2003, 11:38 AM:

It appears to now be down to a problem between Roadrunner and Panix's own upstream provider, Level 3.

Unfortunately, that includes us, since our home access is through Time Warner cable, which is Roadrunner.

I'm now actually able to read my mail in the shell by ssh-ing to the shell at nielsenhayden.com and then hopping from there to Panix. Whether Teresa will bother with this slightly esoteric workaround is another question. The latency is pretty annoying. (Yes, I know, back in the heroic age of the internet we sneered at latency. We typed in entire 5,000-word Usenet flames before any of our characters actually appeared on screen. Of course, that explains a lot about Usenet.)

Ben Rosengart ::: (view all by) ::: November 23, 2003, 02:12 PM:

The RoadRunner problem and the mail problem were
separate. AFAIK, RR is still having connectivity issues.
As for mail, a user set up a mail loop that flooded our
system with tens of thousands of messages in a very
short time.

Thanks for your patience.

(A colleague somehow noticed your weblog entry, and
gave me a pointer, and I figured it would be neighborly
to post something. I'm not a regular reader here.)

Kate Nepveu ::: (view all by) ::: November 24, 2003, 10:26 AM:

(Yes, I know, back in the heroic age of the internet we sneered at latency. We typed in entire 5,000-word Usenet flames before any of our characters actually appeared on screen. Of course, that explains a lot about Usenet.)

Truer words . . .

(My worst latency experience was when I was studying in London for a term and telnetting into Northeastern University's servers in Boston for my Usenet fix. Maybe I should have taken to flaming people those days and blamed it on the latency -- oops, sorry, thought I deleted those lines . . . )

William Burton ::: (view all by) ::: November 24, 2003, 12:21 PM:

Ben,

Why'd you go out of your way to insist that you're not a regular reader of this site?

I promise. No one's gonna bite ya.

Steven desJardins ::: (view all by) ::: November 25, 2003, 02:12 AM:

William, maybe so people wouldn't ask him questions and expect him to notice?