[vsnet-grb-info 4903] GCN website outage

[GCN Circulars]

TO:  All people interested in the GCN Website                     15 July 07
RE:  Website off-line until Monday

The power upgrade and outage Friday evening through Saturday day
has been completed.  As expected the GCN Notices and Circulars
continued to work during that interval.  And they continue to work
normally since them.  However, the disks for the hold the GCN website
pages suffered a failure during power-up.  So the GCN website (and all
Goddard Building 2 websites) are off-line.

And while I am sending out this annoncement, I'll take the opportunity
to explain why there were no GCN Notices for GRB 070714A (Swift Trigger 284850).
This burst occurred during the portion of the Swift orbit covered by
the TDRSS_275 satellite which was experiencing problems at the time.
Hense all the messages transmitted by Swift for that burst were not received
by the TDRSS satellite and therefore nothing was transmitted down to the ground
to GCN.  So there were no Notices to send out.  TDRSS_275 was restored to normal
operations a couple orbits later.

Sincereely,
Scott Barthelmy



PRE POWER OUTAGE ANNOUNCEMENT:                               13 Jul 07
> A power outage is planned for tonight and tomorrow that will take
> the Swift Data Center off-line (including access to Swift quick look data),
> prevent access to HEASARC web pages (including access to Swift data),
> prevent access to GCN web pages,
> and interrupt normal e-mail service to most of the Swift science team at GSFC.
> 
> The GCN Notices will continue to be distributed.  The GCN computer and routers
> are on a separate power circuit.
> 
> However, the GCN Circulars will have some difficulties.  Reviewing the traceroutes
> of recent Circular submissions shows about 1/3 of them went though a machine
> that will be in the power-shutdown (2/3 went straight to the GCN computer).
> (I could not determine why there was a difference between the two groups of
> submissions.)  So please note that if you submit, you might be in the 1/3 group.
> For this 20-hour interval, if you submit and do not receive back the usual
> success/problem preport email, do not submit it again.  The lack of a return
> probably means you are in the 1/3-group.  If you send in a second submission,
> they will both queue up, and ten when power is restored both copies will be distributed.
> 
> These systems should start going off line at 22:00 UT July 13th (today),
> and should begin to be restored tomorrow July 14th at about 17:00 UT.