[SC-Help] Re: What's wrong now, Spamcop?

[WazoO]

"Mike Easter" <MikeE at ster.invalid> wrote in message
news:dvhldc$3cq$1 at news.spamcop.net...
> Alan Brown wrote:
> > I had problems in the Tue-Thu timeframe.
>
> > I didn't report anything
> > because I have grown accustomed to these outages (SC may not call them
> > that, but from a user perspective, it IS an outage).
>
> Outages is another term different than generic 'problems'.
>
> A recent post on Wed said this:
>
> John Anderson wrote:
> > An error occurred while processing your request.
> > Reference #97.bc2c7b3f.1142434241.d14a52

http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?act=module&automodule=custom&page=stats
was showing one of those dips/dropouts in that timeframe.
Looking at that chart right now ... a dip at 0600 GMT -5 took incoming
spam down to around 2, Reports to around 2.5 ... lasting about 15
minutes.  Then around 1640 GMT -5 one sees a serious ramp-up in
the incoming stuff.  The dips have never been explained (again, there
is no IronPort representation here or in the Forum, and whether the
question is never asked or answers are considered non-public, nothing
on this from Don/Deputies) ... so whether it's that one server out of a
set went down for a bit, or just that the actual outage was short enough not
to be actually seen in this graphic .. no way to tell from this side of the
screen. The point is that this graphic is available, whether www.spamcop.net
is up or down, so it's at least a starting point for troubleshooting.
>
> > Databases corrupt, mail servers down, DNS problems, parser errors, you
> name it.

As just described, there is a lot going on.  Unfortunately, this same
description leaves out that the component parts are hosted on
different systems, different coasts, on hardware and software owned and
mantained by different folks.

> > > Spam Cop has a history of technical problems.  I've been a subscriber
> > for about four years and a reporter much longer than that.  Denial of
> > problems until it FINALLY affects one of the SC admins seems to be
> > par for the course.

On the other hand, over those years, there's been a lot of troubleshooting
scenarios for users with issues that are itmes that the Deputies won't
'see' for themselves.  The oddities in a max MTU size for some
Europeon users using a certain backbone while spamcop.net was hosted
in a datacenter in New York for instance. The craziness that got resolved
when it was found that the complainants were all using an extra bit of
software (that was never mentioned in all the complaining) .. Add-Subtract
if I recall correctly .... and this is not to ignore that some other issues
appear when one of the Akamai servers decides to hose things up ...

> You are saying you see problems frequently.  I'm saying I rarely see
> problems.  I have no explanation for the difference in our observations.

My position is that I check the newsgroups, I check the Forum, and
if there is corresponding traffic, I'll kick out an e-mail to get some
attention from staff if it appears needed.  Don/Deputies are geographically
distributed, but still all in North America, so there is no 24 hour
coverage guaranteed.  On the other hand, some of us other folks
have 'strange' sleep patterns, so a 'system-wide' problem will
usually be noticed by someone (and again, that's the background of
me placing the off-www.spamcop.net site link to show the Reporting
system status graphic/link on the Forum pages) .... if it's a real 'down'
issue, alarms do go off in the datacenter, IronPort has staff present to
try to jump on those issues.  But that's as far as the "for the public" data
has gone thus far.