News, Mail, DNS, problems, problems, problems

[Max G. Schmitt]

Is it just me or is it all coming apart?

Here's the current state of affairs at IBM Global Networks for April1
7:55 PM GMT, or should we rather call it NOTworks?

1) According to the Status page, mail is slow and has been since I
first checked this morning (7:10 AM GMT). And yes, it is! An email
from another IGN customer, sent March 31, 12:02 PM GMT didn'r arrive
at pop3 until April 1, 7:55 PM GMT.

2) Logging on to pop3 is tedious at best, impossible at worst, even
when there are no problems reported. It took me 10! minutes to
retrieve 4 short messages on Saturday, March 29.

3) A message I posted this afternoon, 2:15 PM GMT to the ibmnet
newsgroups on news2.ibm.net still doesn't show up on the "new and
improved" news1.ibm.net.

4) I am experiencing massive delays and pauses when retrieving news
headers or articles on news1. Pauses can be as long as 90 seconds.
The pauses are long enough to make Netscape time out, at least Agent
1.0 will continue.

5) Once there is data coming from the new server, it is coming slowly,
to put it mildly. Best performance I ever got was about half as fast
as news2.

6) The DNS servers seem to be dying as well, tonight it took them a
minimum of 15 seconds to look up a server name, typically 20 or more,
often leading to timeouts and Netscape error messages. This means even
the only thing at IGN that used to be acceptable, Web Access, is now a
problem.

Max