NOTE: The difax mailing list is no longer active. The list archives are made available for historical reasons.
On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, Robert Mullenax wrote:
Okay, here is my point. Alden is supposed be a provider of data for operational use. How can a provider for such purposes have a 2 week outage? We had a T1 go down at our site in New Mexico a few years back and it only took > a week to be repaired and this is in the very rural area of eastern New Mexico AND we told them it was not a rush job.The main thing though is the lack of response. I know customer service is becoming a thing of the past, but not responding to your customers regarding a 2-week outage is ridiculous.
I agree. Here's some more information and a clarification. For you long-time UNIDATA folks, Alden sends the data through a T1 line from their Billerica, MA home to an uplink site in Monee, IL south of Chicago. Old-timers (I'm gonna get it here! ;-) ) remember how the old McIDAS feed was sent out at 9600 baud through that. In any case, that cable got cut off. MCI is working on it, Alden says, but MCI might have leased the line to Ameritech, which is complicating things. And there's a problem somewhere in there somewhere. Not that it affects me, but they don't yet know where the T1 problem really is yet, though they hope to have that pinned down this afternoon. So why are the Internet data feeds up? Simple. It's not the T1 to Washington DC/NCEP where they get the data. It's the T1 from Massachusetts to northeastern Illinois to *uplink* the data to the dish. In house, their data feeds are fine at Alden. So, they are getting the data...but the only way they can send it out is via the IDD. That having been said, lightning and thunder.alden.com are having problems independent of all of this, which is why DiFAX has been dying. But today it is dead because the NWS is having major networking problems. The NWS says they may not be back up until tonight. For what it is worth...
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