Archive of Show-Me Net Outages

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Nov. 25, 2002  The Benton modem pool was down from 5:30p.m.-8:00p.m.

Nov. 16, 2002  The Benton modem pool was down from 4:20p.m-7:45p.m.

Nov. 11, 2002    MOREnet's server that verifies Show-Me Net members' user names and passwords was down all evening (5:00pm-midnight.)  Members were unable to connect during that time. 

Sept. 25, 2002   MOREnet's server (Lesche) that verifies Show-Me Net members' user names and passwords was down about 15 minutes - 6:00pm-6:15pm.  Members were unable to connect during that time.  But, members already on line were not affected.

July 26-Aug. 13 Perryville.   At least one phone line at Show-Me Net's Perryville modem pool was out of service.  All lines appeared to be back in service after 15 phone calls to SWBell repair, 8 trips to Perryville, and only 17 days.

August 8, 2002  The City of Jackson replaced 2 power transformers near Show-Me Net's office in Jackson.  Power was off from 6:30am-7:15am.  Most members were unable to connect during that time.

July 14, 2002  4:40am-9:00am Benton   One third of the modems in Benton stopped responding, again.

June 27, 2002 10:35am-11:35am. Benton.  One third of the modems in Benton stopped responding for one hour.

June 7, 2002 1:15-1:30 p.m. The Benton modem pool was down about 15 minutes due to a power outage.

May 15, 2002 3:45-7:20 p.m. The Internet backbone was down due to a fiber cut near St. Louis. 

May 13, 2002 3:00-3:20 p.m.  The Internet backbone was down due to a power outage in St. Louis.  Show-Me Net members were not able to connect or experienced slow connections.

January-April, 2002 Perryville  SWBell has been unable to provide lines with dial tones at the Perryville modem pool.  Show-Me Net staff has reported dead lines at least 15 times this year.  However, repairs are not completed or other lines soon go dead.  We will keep escalating the issue until SWBell provides adequate service.  Please bear with us.  NOTE:  As of 4/17/02, all phone lines were finally working. 

April 11-12, 2002  Jackson. Around 3:30-6:30 a.m. and 7:00-8:00 p.m., electrical power to the area around the Riverside Regional library was cut while the City worked on new utility poles.  Members were unable to connect at Jackson during this period.   One bank of modems was knocked out of service for a  much longer period.

March 28-29, 2002  Perryville.  Six phone lines leading to Show-Me Net's Perryville modem pool went out of service yesterday afternoon.  SWBell has been notified and will put the lines back in service ASAP.

March 18-21, 2002 - Benton. SWBell struck again.   For no apparent reason, 21 lines were out of service. 

March 15, 2002   This just in from MOREnet  "At approximately 8:45am this morning all major Core routers within the MOREnet network were disabled due to an excessive amount of routing updates being received from SBC's, Southwestern Bell Corp. Internet Services, one of MOREnet's primary Internet Service providers. This resulted in a temporary loss of all network connectivity.
Core networking services were restored at approximately 10:30am, requiring the disabling of the offending port and a manual reboot of all Core routers. As a result of these emergency actions all Columbia-based services, including statewide Video conferencing, local (Columbia) DNS services, and the MOREnet web site, were unavailable until approximately 2:00pm this afternoon."
This means that Southwestern Bell Corp. Internet Services knocked the entire state off the Internet.  The server at MOREnet that checks your user name and password was knocked out was not put back in service until about  5:00 p.m. 

February 13, 2002  This just in from MOREnet:  "In order to mitigate possible security issues, and improve performance, MOREnet will be reloading the Columbia core routers with a new version of code tonight at midnight. The outage is expected to last no longer than 15 minutes." This means Show-Me Net members will not be able to connect for a short period tonight.

February 1, 2002 2:00-500pm   Several phone lines leading to the Jackson modem pool quit working properly. Calls to these lines didn't reach our modems. They went to private voice lines.  

January 18, 2002 The Benton modem pool went down for 3 hours last night and again from 11:05am to 1:05pm, due to power outages.

January 10, 2002 Benton, 8:00-9:15am.   A power outage in Benton knocked out all of our equipment in the Benton modem pool.   Members were unable to connect until power was restored

December 19, 1999 Midnight to 6:00am..  MOREnet moved its server (Lesche) to a new facility during this scheduled and well-publicized outage.  Show-Me Net members were unable to connect during these nighttime hours.. 

December 10  MOREnet reported that a  major AT&T network outage from about noon to 3:00pm disrupted Internet and telephone service across the state.  Show-Me Net members were unable to connect during this time.

November 7  The Missouri Express server (Lesche) was down for most of the day due to scheduled maintenance. Show-Me Net and all Community information networks hosted on the server were unavailable during this time.   Work done included Year 2000 preparation.  Notice of this planned downtime was prominently displayed for several days at the top of Show-Me Net's homepage.

October 6-7 Jackson -- Once again, all of the 56K modems quit about 1:00pm.  Service to these 36 modems was restored around noon on the 7th.

October 5  Jackson --  We added 12 more 56K modems.  The 56K modem bank experienced brief periods of downtime.

October 4-5 Jackson --  The first comm server went down.  MOREnet reconfigured it Tues. morning. 16 modems were out of service overnight.

September 20  Perryville-- The modem pool was upgraded this morning in preparation for expansion.  Members were unable to connect to the pool for about 2 hours.  Now, there are now more than 40 extra modems in the rack ready to be connected to phone lines, as needed.

September 6-15  About 1:00pm, Labor Day, the bank of 56K modems in Jackson quit.   On Thursday, 9/9, Cisco shipped, "overnight," a new modem chassis, which arrived Monday, 9/13.  MOREnet finished configuring these 24 modems Wednesday morning.  During this period, the 56K modems were not in service.

August 1-2  Jackson, a comm server which supports 16 modems quit at 8:30am. It was replaced early Wednesday.

August 13-16  The switch over to a new server on Friday (details) caused a period of partial e-mail outages and slow downloads over the weekend.  E-mail and downloads are now faster than ever.

July 29-30  Jackson's new bank of 56K modems went down after 4:00pm.  MOREnet put them back in service by 10:00am

July 15-27 The conversion of some of the Jackson modem pool's modems to 56K was not too smooth.  Members occasionally received "Invalid Password" messages and other errors during this time.

July 12-14  The Perryville modem pool was down due to phone line problems. 

July 4, 1999 MOREnet's server that validates our members was down from about 10:00am to 7:00pm.  No members were able to connect during that time.

June 11, 1999 One of the communications servers in the Jackson modem pool stopped functioning at about 4:30pm.  It was returned to service about noon on Sunday, June 13.  Most members were not affected.  However, the 16 members who were connected to the comm server when it went down were not able to connect until Sunday afternoon.

May 5, 1999  The storm system which hit Oklahoma city came through here last night.  Some modems in Jackson were down until about 10:00a.m..  Callers to these modems received "computer is not answering" messages.

March 15, 1999 The phone company was installing another 10 new lines to our Jackson modem pool.  Some members experienced ringing with no answer.

March 14, 1999 Power was out in this part of Jackson from about 8:00am to 12:30pm, probably due to the 14" of snow that fell last night.  All service was down during that time. 

March 5, 1999  We added 10 new modems in Jackson.  But, MOREnet experienced delays in  authenticating members who connected to them.  Members calling the Jackson access number from 4:00-6:00pm may have received "Invalid Password" messages. 

March 5, 1999 Benton users experienced short outage periods this afternoon when all of the modems were moved to new electrical outlet strips in preparation for adding new modems.  All preparations are now complete.  New modems will be installed soon.

February 13-15, 1999  Service in Benton was reduced all weekend when power was cut to 3 modems.  A volunteer from Benton reconnected them at 7:00pm Monday.   Callers to these modems experienced ringing with no answer.

February 11, 1999   We added shelving and made other preparations for adding new modems in Benton.  Benton users were unable to connect from 1:00pm to 7:00pm. 

February 2 and 3, 1999  Service was out for several short periods during these days.   We were installing and testing equipment in connection with the move to a full T1 line.  Twelve modems were out of service in Jackson Monday night.

January 21, 1999   Power was out in this part of Jackson from about 2:20pm to 3:30pm.  All service from all access numbers was down during that time.  From about 3:30pm to 5:00pm, members were able to connect to all sites except those on Show-Me Net's server.  E-mail service was also down until 5:00.  

June 13, 1998 - The Benton access number is finally back up at about 5:30 p.m. today. It has been down since the storm that went through last Tuesday morning. We had to replace both the router and the CSU to get it back up. Hopefully we won't have this long an outage for a very long time.

Jan 5 - Steve Cochran of MOREnet sent the following message. The outage which struck four DS-3 circuits in Columbia appears to be over. We still have not heard back from AT&T as to what the precise cause of the outage was.  The lines originally went down about 9:30 when some of the fiber equipment at the UMC Telecom building failed. This equipment was supposedly fixed by 11:00 this morning. However, the DS-3s did not come back up at that time so we had to contact AT&T for further line testing.

Dec 26, 1997 - This afternoon we got the dedicated line to Benton working again. We were able to contact a more experienced person at MOREnet who helped us get the lines working. We now have the 384kbps line up and running. Members who connect through Benton should see a significantly better connection now. We do not understand why the old 56kbps line would not come up on Wednesday. However both the CSU and the router were not configured properly for the faster connection. Once this was completed everything seems to be working fine.

Dec 25 - The Benton Modem Pool is temporarily unavailable. While it may be a long distance call, you can connect through the Jackson Modem Pool by dialing 1-573-204-0040. All other settings should still work.

We have been wanting to increase the bandwidth to/from Benton from the current 56 KBPS to 384 KBPS. Last week we finally got all the equipment in and tried to make the switch on Friday morning. After several hours it was decided that SWBell had problems with their new line. Tuesday afternoon (Dec 23) we tried again. While it appeared that SWBell corrected the first problem, they seemed to have a new problem with their line.

Wednesday morning (Dec 24) a third attempt was made. We and a different representative from MOREnet were still unsuccessful. This time they were not able to get the original (slower) line to work either. The person from MOREnet thinks there is a problem with the router at Benton and says they will ship a new one to us. However because of the holidays we will not get the replacement until Monday.

Because of the long delay, we will try again on Friday to see if we can get a circuit running using the existing equipment. We deeply regret the problems this causes our Scott County members. However, when we get the switch completed, we expect to have a much faster connection at Benton and will then be able to add additional phone lines.

Nov 12 - Steve Cochran of MOREnet sent the following message at 10:58. There will be two brief outages Sunday morning to allow for the reconfiguration of hardware. The first will be in St. Louis at about 8:00 am. SWB is going to be replacing an ATM card in StLouis-2, which will require shutting down the router. This outage should last about 20 minutes. It should only affect sites connected to the St. Louis hub.

The second will be at about 9:30 am. We will be replacing an ATM card in the Columbia-0 router, which will also require shutdown. This should take less than 30 minutes. All sites connected to the Columbia hub will be affected.

The third outage will be at the new Jefferson City hub at around 9:30 am. We will be installing a new ethernet card in the router there which will also require shutdown of the router. This should also take less than 30 minutes. So far only the State of Missouri connection runs through this router so they will be the only site affected.

Nov 3 - Mark Moody of MOREnet sent the following message at 14:17. Network Operations is currently working with Cisco on a problem in one of the routers in our St Louis hub. One of the backbone interfaces drops periodically, this causes the router to lose about half of the routes in it's routing table. The result of this is that some customers are unable to reach some other sites in MOREnet, while the routes are missing. Left alone the routes will eventually restore themselves, or our staff can restore them manually. We will continue to work towards a permanent solution to this problem. In the meantime your patience is appreciated.

Oct 30 - The bad protocol connection problems appears to have been fixed. We found that one of the ports on our Cisco communications controller in Jackson was not working correctly. Turning the unit off and back on seemed to reset the ports and correct the problem. If you experience further such problems, please send e-mail to Larry@showme.net describing your difficulty.

Brief outage possible Friday, October 31
Users might experience a brief outage around noon CST, Friday, October 31, as MOREnet fully connects the Jefferson City hub to the new MOREnet backbone. The outage is expected to last about 15 minutes.

Oct 11 - MOREnet has switched over to the new, faster backbone. This has significantly improved the transmission of data within the state. However, they have also experienced some associated routing problems which have resulted in failures to connect. For example, this morning between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. I was aware of difficulty in connecting from Jackson. After the routing problems cleared up, members were again able to get in. We know MOREnet is working on these routing problems and expect they will soon get them solved.

Oct 2, 1997 - This morning and last night we still had reports of a bad protocol when members were trying to connect to the Jackson modem pool. We believe we identified one of the new modems that was not working properly. Temporarily we have busied out that line and have ordered a replacement modem. We hope that this action will further reduce these problems.

When I got home tonight (at about 8:30) there were a couple people who reported they were having problems getting their e-mail or reaching any web site. While I was not able to duplicate the problem, we determined that it was a problem with Domain Name Service. We restarted that service on Show-Me Net's computer system and the problem went away for these two members (one from Benton and one from Jackson). If you also had this problem, it should be fixed for you too.

The new phone lines that were installed in Jackson on Tuesday seem to be working fine. However with the bad modem mentioned above and the number of callers we know we still don't have enough lines. We placed an order for more two more lines today. We are waiting for SWBell to give us an install date.

Oct 1 - This morning between midnight and 1:00 a.m., MOREnet was finally successful in replacing the DL3800 IMUX on the SprintLink circuit in St. Louis. Steve Cochran of MOREnet wrote We expect this to increase the reliability of the link. We are still seeing a small number of CRC errors on the link, however, and will be looking into fixing these. The error rate is low enough that it should not have a noticeable impact on throughput.

Yesterday, Show-Me Net added two phone lines to the Jackson pool. This brings us to 21 lines there. We have 11 in Benton. We also moved all our equipment into a single electrical cabinet. However, when we unplugged the power to the router and replugged it into the cabinet the router lost its configuration. We expected to have a momentary interuption. Instead it took us nearly two hours (between 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m.) to restore service. During this time, no members were able to dial into the Jackson pool and those in Benton were unable to send or receive e-mail or access our web page.

Sept 24 - When the St. Louis hub unit messes up, as it has several times in the past two weeks, it affects Show-Me Net in two ways. It makes your net access sluggish, and even failing in some cases. It also at times will not let us log on, because the log-on must go through St. Louis to be acknowledged through Columbia, MO. As of Wednesday, it did not seem to be a problem.
Most of these comments are cut and pasted from MOREnet notes on the system status.

Sept 24 - MOREnet has designated a permanent maintenance window on Sunday from midnight to noon to perform regularly scheduled maintenance. We do not send out e-mail to remind folks about this maintenance window. You need to warn your users that they may experience difficulties during the entire maintenance window. Often folks will get used to having few difficulties during that time, then can't figure what is going on if there is some problem.

The St. Louis Sprintlink connection that provides Internet service to the St. Louis hub connections has been unreliable lately. In the past two weeks, MOREnet has had multiple failures of the 6-Mbps link to the Chicago hub. Traffic destined for the Internet automatically was rerouted to other Internet connections into MOREnet. The net result of this has been a near-capacity load on the current T1 backbone.

MOREnet has discussed the inability of this existing infrastructure to provide backup for local outages, such as an Internet connection failure at a single hub. As such, the MOREnet2 project and network design was created to address this limitation. What is being experienced now is exactly what was predicted would occur without a move to MOREnet2. The delays in deploying MOREnet2 have placed the network in a somewhat-overloaded situation.

Immediately, MOREnet worked with Southwestern Bell and Sprint in two attempts to replace the failing component in St Louis; specifically the IMUX device that combines MOREnet's four T1-Internet lines into a single 6-Mbps connection. Both times MOREnet staff worked for hours with SWB and Sprint but were unsuccessful in getting the new equipment to work. The solution for most outages is to simply unplug and reseat the cable from our St. Louis hub router into the IMUX. The outage September 22 involved multiple problems starting at Sprint's router in Chicago that affected many of its customers. This initial problem was resolved but then caused another failure at our St. Louis hub, which was restored Tuesday morning. Traffic now is flowing normally. MOREnet will continue its efforts to replace the current IMUX device to eliminate the problems until migration to the new MOREnet2 high-speed DS3 backbone is complete. Until this occurs, MOREnet will continue to monitor the Sprintlink connection closely and respond quickly when a failure occurs.

Mon. Sept 22 - More problems throughout the day with the main MOREnet Sprintlink connection at SW Bell in St. Louis.

Larry Loos replies to a question about too many busy signals for a Show-Me Net user:
"Our busy signals are related to problems with SWBell getting our modem hunt groups properly configured. We are continuing to work with them and plan to add additional lines as soon as we feel they can make them work. Sunday morning they were only letting the first 14 callers get through while we still had six additional lines unused."

The St. Louis Sprintlink connection was down from about 1:00 am to 4:00 am this Sunday morning. Southwestern Bell, working with Sprint, a Digital Link technician, and MOREnet, was attempting to replace the DL3800 IMUX (manufactured by Digital Link) which has recently begun to become eratic. Despite configuring the replacement DL3800 identically to the original, and despite swapping out virtually every other piece of equipment at the St. Louis end of this circuit, we were unable to get the new device to function at all. We were forced to put the circuit back the way it was with the old DL3800 for the time being.

This was the second attempt to replace the old DL3800. The previous attempt also ended in failure.

Digital Link and Southwestern Bell will continue to research the problem with the current DL3800, as well as try to figure out why the new one wouldn't work.

---MoreNet, Sunday Sept 21

We plan to bring down the St. Louis Sprintlink at midnight on Sunday morning for maintenance. We will be coordinating with Southwestern Bell and Sprint to replace the DL3800 IMUX in St. Louis, which we believe has been responsible for several outages in St. Louis over the past few weeks. The outage could last up to several hours. Traffic should reroute across the MOREnet backbone, but the increased traffic on the backbone may cause decreased network performance throughout MOREnet. [-MOREnet Sept. 20]

Thurs 18 Sept - The authentication server (Lesche - which detects and says yes or no on your user ID and password) was down for "emergency surgery" Thursday morning, for less than an hour. Hopefully it's much better, now. It is located on the University of Missouri-Columbia campus, and also authenticates for other community nets across the state.

Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 17:28 [from More.net]

The Lesche Authenticaion server has returned to service. We apologize for the inconvenience. We are still expecting an emergency hardware service outage during business hours tomorrow (9-18-97).

Thank you for your understanding throughout this event.

5:21 p.m. Tue Sept. 16 [from MOREnet] - The St. Louis Sprintlink connection is down again. I am in the process of contacting SWB to get it fixed. Traffic destined for Sprint from St. Louis is routing across the backbone instead, causing heavy load across all of MOREnet.

6:00 p.m. Tue Sept. 16 - The St. Louis Sprintlink connection has been restored. It will take 20 to 30 minutes for routing to sort itself out again and things are back to normal. Backbone congestion has already begun to decrease.

7:00 p.m. Tue Sept. 16 [from Larry Loos] Fred, access all day has been VERY slow. However, right now it is pretty good. Routing times between here and MOREnet are one tenth what they were earlier. But there still is a "bad piece of equipment" in St Louis that fails occasionally. The box is owned by Sprint but located in the SWBell offices. While that is very good when things work, it causes bureaucracy problems getting things fixed.

They are working hard to get the equipment replaced, but new ones from the manufacturer have arrived "dead on arrival".

The problems that people are having getting connected have been of two main types. One is a "bad password" message. These can be caused when the computer at MOREnet is down (I know that occured frequently on Thursday, Sept 11) or when network traffic is so slow the verification just times out.

The other problem is most often reported by Windows 95 users who say they are told the system "could not negotiate a copmpatible set of networking protocols". I don't yet know what is causing this problem. I have talked with several individuals at MOREnet but I don't yet have an answer. I will keep after it and will try to learn something as soon as possible. - Sept 16

> On Sunday September 14th, 1997, beginning at 7 a.m., MOREnet will be changing its interior routing protocol. During the change, you may notice instabilities and possibly may not be able to reach certain sites. The changes should be completed before the close of the maintenance window at Noon Sunday. When the changes are complete, you should be able to access any site you were able to reach before. While this change will not make any noticeable difference in your use of the Internet, it will allow MOREnet to make more efficient use of its IP address space, and take advantage of other technologies to improve our network.

>Equipment Upgrade Scheduled For Wednesday Morning. MOREnet will be working with Southwestern Bell and Sprint to replace equipment that connects MOREnet to Sprint, beginning at midnight, Wednesday, September 10. Work should be completed by 1 a.m. During this time, traffic destined for the Internet out of MOREnet's St. Louis hub will reroute across MOREnet's backbone.

This page was last modified January 12, 2005

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