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January 19, 2006
Terrible Tuesday
You know, the bookstore's MBS application does give us grief on occasion, but usually it's pretty stable. Tuesday was the exception that proves the rule.
First, a call from Kristi - The registers are beeping and going off line. No customers can be served. Man, again??!! Pulling up MRTG showed a huge spike in traffic across the switch. This has been a recurring problem, with NO ryme or reason to it. What could be hitting the switch so hard at 8:00? On a hunch I asked Kristi to go downstairs and see if anyone was in the computer lab. Hello, Rick! He was dutifully ghosting half the lab. Well, what do you know, ghosting the lab causes the bookstore registers to totally quit working.
Second thing.
Another call from Kristi?? Now what? Nobody can buy books off our web site. Why not? Oh, no current "term". Well, digging through the admin pages, I see there's a Winter 06 term that doesn't end until Feb 2nd. That's OK. BUT, there's a second entry point, on a totally different page - limiting the time when books can be bought and it's set to Jan. 13, 2006. Switch to Jan. 31, 2006, and voila! All the students who still need to buy textbooks for this term on the web can do so.
Third, and while all of the above was happening, an http default thread was observed to be using about 50% of the server's CPU cycles. Ending the thread merely moved it to another one. Stopping and re-starting the http server did nothing. A call to MBS internet support revealed that this problem had been encountered one other time. Four hours later I was convinced that there was no MBS solution available, however it did seem that placing a packet policy in place would probably be propitious. An email for help to Troy and Travis with the offending IP was the cure. Thanks, guys!
NOT a quiet day at the bookstore!
Posted by rossm at January 19, 2006 2:28 PM
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