NAMI Network Monitor

Due to a windstorm in the northern Virginia area, at approximately 11:00 am today power to the NAMI office was cut. Power was restored within 30 minutes. However, it appears one of our webservers failed to restart on its own. Non-microsite websites hosted by NAMI are therefore unreachable at this time (4:00 PM EST). I’m on my way in to the office to manually re-start this system. Updates to follow…

4:36 pm: Service has been restored. If the continuing storm knocks power out to the office during the night, service to non-microsite websites will be restored the following morning.

As part of our continuing network restructuring, the login system for the NAMInet and mail group systems has been changed (technical details below). For the vast majority of users, this change will be transparent, and require no special action on your part.

If you find you cannot log in to the NAMInet or the mail group system, try using your NAMI WEBSITE username and password. If you find this doesn’t work either, contact me immediately with your username & password and I’ll fix your account ASAP.

Please note this change **DOES NOT** affect: the public website, webmail, email, webmembership, accounting, network monitor, or file and print servers. These systems will continue to function with no changes required. Mail groups will also contiue to transmit mail properly.

TECHNICAL DETAIL:
During the summer, NAMI replaced its old e-mail infrastructure with a new system. The old mail system was kept in place because our old mail groups required it to function. When the mail groups were migrated to their new system in the fall, the old e-mail system became completely redundant and was shut down. However, the LDAP directory which the NAMInet and the new mail group system use for authentication still “lived” on this old server. Our network expansion plans require the re-tasking of the old NAMI mail server, so this LDAP directory needed to be moved to a different machine.

Unfortunately the old mail system’s OS (a badly battered Windows NT 4 installation) prevented me from exporting data straight out of the existing LDAP directory. However, since the public website’s authentication information is very close to what the mail server’s old LDAP tree had, I was able to use that data to reconstruct a new directory for the NAMInet and mail group systems.

It’s close, but not perfect. Staff accounts in particular had to be manually added and double-checked. I expect there may still be a few synchronization problems out there, but they can be fixed very quickly as they come up and things should return to normal in a day or two.

I’ll be performing some experiments with the NAMInet this afternoon which could result in failed login attempts. Service interruptions, if indeed they happen, should last no more than a few minutes at a time. If you try to access a NAMInet resource and find it won’t accept your password, please wait five minutes and try again. Please note the webmail, monitor, website, webmembership, accounting, file and print servers WILL NOT be affected.

NAMI’s internet access is down for the moment. I am on the phone with our provider and they are working on the problem at the moment. Office connectivity will not be affected, but office employees will not be able to access the internet, and field employees and grassroots users will not be able to access our network. If you have members of your team which operate primarily outside the office, please be sure to contact them and let them know what’s going on.

8:36 am UPDATE: Connectivity has been restored. Apparently some one or some thing turned off the system that controls our connection (technically, the frame host had been stopped). Our internet provider has opened a ticket to investigate why this occurred.

Our network monitoring system also checks on printer health. If a printer is out of paper, starts jamming, runs out of toner, or experiences other problems, the monitor will spot it and let the appropriate people know. To keep the printers organized, they’ve been named and that name attached to them on a tag stuck to the front or top of the printer. If you experience any troubles with a printer, or need to be hooked up to a different one, please be sure to use that name.

Welcome to the NAMI network monitoring system. Visit this area for notices on downtime, outages, updates, and other IT-related news. To view the real-time status of our network resources, click one of the links on the right.