[Users] Einstein Toolkit mailing lists were down

[Frank Loeffler]

Hi,

I am sorry to inform you that the Einstein Toolkit mailing lists were
not working correctly for the period of one week (details below). Emails
still made it to the lists, to the archives, but not out to the members
of the lists again. As far as I can see no one was unsubscribed, but
instead set to 'nomail'.

As you can read this email now, this was fixed. Please let me know if
you still have issues with any of the Einstein Toolkit lists.

Old emails will not be re-sent to the email lists. In order to see what
was sent to the users mailing list in April, please consult the
archives:

  http://lists.einsteintoolkit.org/pipermail/users/2015-April/thread.html

I again would like to apologize for the outage,

Frank Loeffler



Technical details (only read on if you _really_ want to know):

About a week ago, the university firewall admins apparently blocked
outgoing mail traffic (port 25) for the special group of machines the ET
server is in - without notice to anyone, not even the department admins.
This would have been noticed earlier, if not most machines in that group
either relayed through an "official" mailserver anyway, or used IPv6
(which the university forgot to block). The ET machine was one of the
unlucky machines that tried IPv4, and didn't relay: it ran into
timeouts for every outgoing mail, eventually leading to bounces, which
eventually lead to the 'nomail' status on the mailing lists. This
usually produces a loud scream to the list admins, but that is sent via
email... In addition I missed a direct email from one of the ET
maintainers notifying us of the issue because I didn't have a good
internet connection unexpectedly. Murphy's Law.

After figuring this all out (we don't have a "direct line" to the
university admins as you'd think, just the department admins), we
decided to use the relay.

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