Last week's problem

Last week's problem

Paul E. Prusakowski

3/12/2001

Dear oandp-l'ers,

I wanted to quickly inform everyone about the nature of the problem that
occurred last week with the multiple postings. It always seems that these
things happen when I am away at a meeting and am not monitoring the
listserve in my office!

What happened was not an isolated instance on oandp-l, but rather something
that affected possibly hundreds of listservers that had subscribers that use
a service called Road Runner and who live in none other than Texas!

Last week there was a server problem in Houston, Texas at one of the Road
Runner facilities. The Road Runner people had to put in a new server to fix
the problem, knowing that a side effect of doing so would be the generation
of a series of duplicate e-mails being sent. For some reason, emails from
listservers were shot back through the listservers and accepted as new
messages, and repost to everyone on the list. For the techno curious, see
<URL Redacted>

We had about 50 or so messages. Some of my fellow listserv owners had
experienced 1000's of duplicate messages from some very active lists being
run by Microsoft. A lot of delete keys were being used on March 9, 2001!

I am sorry for the inconvenience, and assure you that it was NOT a virus on
our system, but rather a glitch that affected many. I am hoping that the
powers that be of the listserv developers will come up with a measure to
prevent this in the future.

There will be a delay in posts being sent to the public until I am sure that
this issue has been completely resolved.

Thanks again for your participation.

Sincerely,

Paul E. Prusakowski, CPO
Moderator, oandp-l