[exim-announce] Exim mailing list outages

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: exim-announce
Subject: [exim-announce] Exim mailing list outages
The Exim mailing lists were not working until earlier today (UK time).
This appears to have been a result of their host not coming back
properly after we had a power incident on Tuesday October 3rd, described
by my colleague thus:

An electrician managed to drill through a cable which took out power
to 5 racks full of kit in the Computing Service machine room at 09:18.

The electrical work was to install additional power distribution.
Rather amusingly part of the motivation behind this is to rearrange
supplies so that it is harder to take out 5 racks full of kit with a
single drill.

We believe that the mailing lists are back on track now. Sorry for the
outage. However, I'm afraid that isn't the end of it:

On Sunday October 9th, from approx 09:00 to 15:00 UK time, there is a
scheduled power outage in our machine room. This is the end of a long
saga involving a backup generator that died under test and could not
trivially be mended, a replacement generator that took some time to
arrive (including entertainment with a small archway and a large truck),
and I think some other related disasters (I've kept away from most of
the details). Hopefully after this work is done we will be back to a
situation where we have reliable backups for power outages. That is why
this work is being done now - at our busiest time of year (term having
just started) - because it's a sort of emergency.

Anyway, it does mean that the Exim mailing lists and exim.org will be
down for the duration of the power outage. We'll be checking that the
mailing lists come back afterwards.

Philip

--
Philip Hazel, University of Cambridge Computing Service.