Hi all, On behalf of all of us on committee, I'd like to apologise for RedBrick's recent spate of downtime in the last two weeks. More details about it are on the redbrick.announce newsgroup, (which is the place to look for any up-to-date announcements) but both cases of downtime were caused by unfortunate circumstances. Firstly, RedBrick experienced a severe disk crash, which wiped out our key system disk (with all the programs that essentially make RedBrick work) and which required a few days of flat out admin work for it to be painstakingly restored. The crash occurred during routine maintenance, and the cause of it is still unknown to the sysadmins working on it at the time. Also, RedBrick has been experiencing severe access problems since our physical move to the student centre which has been crippling in terms of maintaining your system. After the crash, the decision was forced to relocate the redbrick machines in the student centre ASAP to prevent future denials of access in times of crises and to have less strings attached when it comes to routine maintenance. This move has proved successful in those terms so far, but unfortunately resulted in in 2 days of downtime due to CSD having problems patching us into our new location. All in all, RedBrick is still a system with a >95% uptime record, and although we still unfortunately experience problems from time to time, often beyond our control (as I'm sure you'll appreciate happened in these circumstances), we are lucky to have a dedicated team of sysaminds and committee members who do their utmost in times of crises. Again, we can only apologise for the downtime, and hopefully it hasn't caused too much disruption with regards projects, mailing lists, announcements, etc. Kind Rgds, Kp -- Karl Podesta Chairperson DCU Networking Society (RedBrick) http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie Ph: 086 8607441