Been sending posters requesting... where next... this.

Diane

F.Y.I.

As to a new place, were checking out options... nothing is quite right so far. Look to Ed Yourdons web-site for directions tomorrow.

http://www.yourdon.com

We hope to have this resolved or figured out by mid-afternoon tomorrow.

Down to the wire, eh?

Now... A TBY2K Negotiation with Phil...

Okay,

9:30 pm PST Dec 29th, 1999

Spread the word.

Spent about a half hour, or more, on the phone with Phil Greenspun this evening. He turned on the Main TB Forum for a little while earlier today, and immediately the spiders began hitting it, so he closed off the TBY2K Forum, the Prep Forum, HumptyDumpty Y2K and the new TBY2K Rollover Forum.

Ive already had two offers from people that total $1,200.00 towards Phils Pentium. MIT is not allocating fund towards the server farm, so Phil has older equipment, 8 servers, 6 of which are down. In other words... its on its last legs and our TimeBomb stuff which takes over 900% of his capacity (his words earlier), including recent spider problems, took it over the top.

So, in an odd win-win, if we can pull together $7,500.00 that will get donated to an Animal Shelter (see e-mail below), then Phil, out of his pocket will match us and get the server he needs for MIT.

Of course this will take longer, but if we can donate, A.S.A.P., hes willing to pull some people in on this holiday week and move things to some back-up servers until he can get the new equipment. He said... this could happen within a few hours.

(His own deadline is Feb 1st when the new MIT classes start and hes trying to get ready for that).

So, our challenge, is to show him we care enough about Y2K and next year to say, okay... support us... and well support MIT through the animals near and dear to his heart.

Diane

Subject: Re: Working on getting your Pentium
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 23:39:49 -0500
From: Philip Greenspun < philg@zurich.ai.mit.edu >
Reply-To: philg@mit.edu
To: sacredspacesfs@earthlink.net
CC: ed@yourdon.com

Okay, tell them to visit

https://db.photo.net/shoppe/

and select one of the "donation to SARA Sanctuary" options.

Say that you have $1,200 so far and when we hit $7500 I'll put my full efforts into squeezing the last drops of performance out of our existing servers...

Philip

###

Read the message at the main TBY2K URL...

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic=TimeBomb%202000%20%28Y2000%29

Y2K Forums are Shutdown

I had to shut down the Y2K forums due to a huge load on this pathetic ancient server. I've been meaning to buy some new server hardware but hadn't gotten around to it. Meanwhile we also needs lots of sysadmin time to do things like identify robots, exclude them based on IP address, upgrade to a newer version of AOLserver and a new Oracle driver, etc.

If you want to see the forums back, prove it! Surf over to https://db.photo.net/shoppe/ (ignore the warning boxes about the MIT certificate authority not being recognized; your credit card is transmitted securely) and make a tax-deductible donation to SARA Sanctuary, a no-kill animal shelter. They will get 100% of your money. If the Y2K users collectively come through with at least $7,500 (so far we have about $1,500 committed), I'll pay for some new dual-Pentium Linux boxes out of my own pocket.

This computer is ancient (167 MHz processors) and shared by thousands of publishers. The forum you've requested is a Y2K discussion forum that consumes 95% of the server's resources during standard times. Sorry to deny access to this forum right before the big day (actually at MIT we don't really care about Y2K; we are more terrified when the semester starts up on February 1), but it is the only way to preserve services for the other users.

Fundamentally the problem is that Y2K users don't believe in our Oracle database and tape backups. They are using desktop robots to try to transfer the 300,000+ messages in this forum down to their local machines, one thread at a time. This results in my server getting hundreds of requests per second, each of which requires several Oracle queries. The bottom line demand is more than 1000 Oracle queries per second on a computer that is probably slower than what you have on your desktop. I tried turning the Y2K forums on again after a hiatus but found that users immediately turned their robots on as well.

As the author of http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/ I'm a bit humiliated that my service didn't hold up. On the other hand, it was built to support human beings talking to each other. The average human can't read 10 threads per second! So it isn't surprising that multiple simultaneous robots could overwhelm this machine.

Sorry,

Philip
just before Y2K

###

Phils trying to get his server farm taken care of. If we support him, as he has us for the past two years, he'll get people in as soon as tomorrw to move things onto back-up student servers sitting idle right now. It takes people to put us on more robust servers that can withstand these spider attacks.

He'll make it a priority.

Diane

-- Anonymous, December 30, 1999

Answers

BTW... please do whichever works for you... pray or meditate for several miracles.

Night.

11:45 pm PST Dec 29th

Diane

-- Anonymous, December 30, 1999