Tue, 20 Apr 2004 16:50:54 +0200
It appears the intermittent hardware fault on skink has re-emerged. As a result, you may occasionaly see messages that read "Can't assign requested address" when browsing the web.
We're going to replace the components in the machine that we suspect are faulty either some time later this evening or early tomorrow morning. This will hopefully correct the problem.
In the mean time, we've changed the proxy.pac file to point at the backup proxy on hippo. This should have two effects: it'll reduce the load on skink and it'll make it more transparent when we take skink down for maintenance later.
Users who have hard coded proxy settings may not be able to access the web during the maintenance period. People using autoconfiguration methods should be uneffected.
Wed, 21 Apr 2004 10:10:59 +0200
It appears that our problems with the proxy server are ongoing. Some of the replacement memory we installed yesterday isn't being detected, meaning that the cache doesn't have enough resources to cope with the demands being placed on it.
The result of this is that users would have experienced slow access times to websites fetched through cache1 this morning.
We've again changed the proxy.pac to point at cache2 as the first preference proxy server, and have taken cache1 down to work on it a bit. This should be transparent to most users, bar the possibility of needing to restart their browsers.
Those people using hard coded proxy settings may have difficulty accessing the cache. Please ensure that you're using wwwproxy.ru.ac.za, which has been changed to point at the backup cache server.