With the help of the xfamily who-is-at weber.ucsd. edu and a number of helpful
informants Bill Barowy and I have been reconstructing "the great xmca
brownout" that occasioned the recent "hands up" celebration of being,
again, all "here".
As a problem of distributed cognition we find the brownout fascinating --
how did people notice there was something amiss (IF they noticed), and WHAT
did they think the matter was. For my own part I know it took several days
of me just thinking the list was quiet, then thinking something was wrong
just with my own subscription. The extent of the problem had only just
started dawning on me at the point when the sysadmins had fixed the bug.
It seems that what happened technically was that one part of the software
that maintains the list malfunctioned and accidentally cut the distribution
list down from =89300 subscribers to =8990. This happened some time during t=
he
morning of Thursday November 5th, San Diego time. As far as we know it was
afternoon Monday 9th when the first steps towards alerting the xfamily to
the trouble were taken -- and at that time the extent of it was not clear.
The sysadmins restored the crashed list from backups on the morning of
Wednesday 11th, San Diego time. For a lot of people, who did not get
re-subscribed individually the gap in the mailflow thus lasted for six days.
Now that we have a reasonable reconstruction of the chronology of the
event, we would still like to hear more about what the whole thing looked
like from the perspective of those participants who did not get any xmca
mail during the brownout -- especially those who noticed trouble, and who
did something about it, like contact the xfamily with requests for help.
If you would kindly contribute YOUR story of this event, please do so
directly to us, NOT over the list.
Eva Ekeblad <eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se>
Bill Barowy <wbarowy who-is-at lesley.edu>