[sarex] AMSAT.ORG outage

[Paul Williamson <kb5mu@xxxxxxxxx>]

A few days ago, there was a mechanical failure of the AMSAT.ORG 
server's hard disk drive. The drive has been replaced, and the web 
pages, FTP archives, mail alias system, and mailing lists have now 
been successfully recovered from recent backups. Thanks are due to 
our hosts, who volunteered their efforts to help recover the system. 
Thank you all for your patience during this outage.

A few glitches remain to be worked out, but most services are 
working. If you notice any remaining problems, please let me know.

No subscriptions to mailing lists on amsat.org were dropped. You 
should automatically begin receiving the messages again, as before. 
As usual, if you need to make changes to your subscription you should 
send commands by email to majordomo@amsat.org. The "help" command 
will ask majordomo to send you instructions.

Some few messages that were sent to callsign@amsat.org aliases in the 
seconds just before the failure will have been destroyed. Any 
messages that were sent to callsign@amsat.org during the outage 
should have
been either held by the sending system for later delivery, or 
"bounced" back to the sender with an error message. However, some 
email systems do not reliably generate such error messages, so there 
is no guarantee. All messages should be getting through normally now.

Users who subscribe to automated mailing lists on other systems using 
their callsign@amsat.org mail alias address may find that they have 
been unsubscribed by those other systems, because their email has 
been "bouncing". I suggest that callsign@amsat.org mail aliases 
should NOT be used for these subscriptions. It just adds delay to 
each message delivery, and makes this kind of failure possible. Since 
you are able to subscribe to the automated mailing lists and change 
your address there at will, there is no need to use the convenient
callsign@amsat.org address for that. Resubscribe to any automated 
mailing lists using your real address. Note: there is no need to 
resubscribe to any amsat.org mailing lists; these subscriptions will 
automatically resume as soon as the system is fixed.

A few reminders:

* Test messages to the mailing list are never a good idea. If you 
wonder if something is broken, you can ask me instead.

* Discussion of this event on the mailing lists is off topic. Please 
direct your comments about this to me, and restrict your postings to 
the SAREX mailing list to subjects concerning manned amateur radio 
activities in space.

73  -Paul
kb5mu@amsat.org

----
Via the sarex mailing list at AMSAT.ORG courtesy of AMSAT-NA.
To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe sarex" to Majordomo@amsat.org