BBV.Net Trouble Reports
5/15/06
BBV and Atechno can no longer afford to offer DSL while Verizon overcharges you, our DSL customers. We recommend www.DSLExtreme.com. (800) 491-7221. Our dialup services will continue at the lowest possible rates, throughout Southern California. Email services are now limited to forwarding of all bbv.net email to the online email service of your choice (such as www.Hotmail.com).
4/27/06
At least three times over the last few weeks, an issue at Verizon has caused loss of DSL connectivity throughout Big Bear for all types of DSL customers, whether BBV, Verizon, or other servers. Our normally un-fazed Internet access as suffered some loss of confidence due to this. I believe it is mostly a result of Verizon switching the valley over to the new Fiber-Optic Cable and from the old Microwave tower at Lakeview Point. It appears the last outage affected all cell-phones, Long-distance, Charter Pipeline, T-1 lines and DSL. There is little we can do when Verizon techs tell us there are all working feverishly for a quick resolution.
10/5/05
After 9 months of virtually no problems of any kind, some big companies got in a spitting contest and caused severe access problems that affected BBV.net for 3 days. Level3 Communications, (who provide our connection from DSL to the rest of the Internet), and Cogent Communications, (who for 10 years have connected our Big Bear servers to the Internet), disagreed about allowing each other free, reciprocal access and Level3 began filtering out Cogent users. This caused about 20% of the entire world's Internet users to not see each other as well as many intermittent problems for large websites like MSN. Many agree with level3 and believe Cogent should have been willing to pay for the access Level3 provided them. BBV responded by asking Cogent how to get back to our DSL users and, after they replied "Ask Level3", moved our servers down to Huntington Beach and connected them to a better, and multi-homed, connection care of Automated Internet Technologies (see the photo of the server rack on the bottom of our home page). Once our new IP addresses were propagated (Saturday evening), all services have been restored and we are now better protected from the whim of feuding corporate giants. We have told Cogent that after paying them over $150,000 for years of Internet Access, we are gone due to their inability to stay connected to the ENTIRE Internet and to provide advance warning to us that this disconnection was even a possibility.
1/11/05
The microwave tower connecting Big Bear Valley Telephone circuits with the rest of the world was damaged, causing almost all forms of communications outside Big Bear to fail. For BBV.Net, that meant the circuits we use to connect to out modem lines, DSL service, mail and web hosting were not working most of the time Monday and some of the time Wednesday. At times, DSL and Dial-up lines worked but websites and mail servers did not. Everything now seems to be working for us as of 1/12/05.
11/28/04
A fuse at Verizon's Central Office blew, causing our Verio Internet Circuit to fail for most of the day today. It is back up as of 9 PM.
10/27/04
Power outages due to an early winter storm outlasted our battery backups and caused our servers to be off the Internet from about 8:30 AM to 4 PM. One mail server drive was destroyed but the backup drive was reinstalled by evening with no loss of mail (other than mail that might not have been re-delivered throughout mid-day while we were not on-line). It has been nearly 2 years since an outage exceeded our backup capacity and that was for only short times.
05/31/04
Verizon connections continue to plague us from time to time and large scale SPAM attacks continue to cause intermittent inability to SEND email. We have shut off sendmail from time to time to block these attacks, which can cause complete inaccessibility to your email, but only for short periods. Our new email services are now available and it is just a matter of us finding time to set it up.
05/25/04
Verizon has switching trouble ALL DAY which causes our mail and web servers to loose internet access intermittently all day long. Problems appear to end by 7-8 PM. Problems resumed for part of 5/26 as the effects of the SBC Strike continue to reverberate throughout the Internet. Other local ISPs also have some periods of outage.
05/01/04
New dialup lines now work with no downtime and good connection speeds in most locations.
03/08/04
New Dial-up lines experience several long outages this week. Pac-Bell who operate these new statewide phone circuits, have been upgrading their equipment which has caused us three distinct periods of trouble. They also have reconfigured their routers which blocked access to bbv.net servers for most of the day March 8. This is the same problem they caused in December. They promised us it was fixed as of 4 PM, and then later that evening the whole dialup network went down again as someone there did another upgrade. These big companies right hands don't know what their left hands are doing! It is all back up as of 6 AM March 9.
12/20/03
E-mail server access from new dial-up lines disabled. After three months of testing Pac-Bell made an incorrect change to our access addresses. The change has been fixed, but access to our servers from the new network is still being blocked by our router (as SPAM!!!). We hope to have this resolved by the 1/12. In the meantime, email access is still available from the on-line link on www.bbv.net or from the old dialup numbers and DSL accounts.
12/3/03 We return safely to Big Bear
11/28/03 Fire threatens nearby mountains
Local authorities are asking us to evacuate. Links www.bigbeararea.com www.bigbearnews.us www.rimoftheworld.com. Big Bear Valley Networks, are working on remotely backing up all websites in the event our local offices are shut down. If that happens, it will be in the next 24 hours or so. We plan to take all of the servers off the hill, and will not be able to offer service unless your website is hosted at Sentris, until we are allowed back in to the valley. Pray.
10/7/03 1:30 AM until 2 PM
Pac-Bell moved some equipment last night and it took them until 2 PM today to clean up their connections. Our primary frame-relay connection through Verizon and other telephone systems to Verio and the west coast backbone of the Internet was lost at approximately 1:30 AM, 10/7/03. Verio escalated the issue to their level-3 technical support at around 10 AM. Verio is one of the most dependable Internet Providers in the world and this is the first time since September of 2001 (1/2 day, see below) that we have had any noticeable down time for this connection.
Dial-up service in Big Bear to our local mail and web servers was not interrupted, however dial-up users could not access any web addresses outside the local area. Our mail could not access the Internet outside of bbv.net. DSL and Statewide dial-up service was not interrupted, but could not access our local mail servers or web sites.
12/16/02 11:00 AM to 3:30 PM
Local power outages exceeded our backup capacity at two intervals between 11 AM and 3:30 PM. We have reorganized UPS setup to last a little longer if additional outages occur. No further outages experienced until 10/27/04!
1/15/02 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM
Mail server queue overloaded with largest Spam attack to date. POP mail (incoming) access was interrupted and Tech staff was able to restore service after considerable investigation. No mail deleted, however some mail did not come through. With the assistance of BSDI we have initiated a new SPAM blacklist to target the latest methods of unsolicited mail attacks. We are currently blocking bulk Spam attempts every 3 seconds from connect.travellers.com in case anyone knows them. Even so, we are experiencing close to 2 million mail transfers per day. Legitimate mail should reach about 20,000 per day.
Our mail system typically delivers between 700,000 to 800,000 emails per day with an average processing time of 0.02 minutes and 0 local mailbox transactions in the mail queue mix. And starts to break a sweat at around 1,500,000 transactions per day showing 0.8 minute delays and between 25 and 75 local mailbox transactions in the mail queue mix. The mail queue typically has between 0 and 25 outbound mail transactions that can't be delivered because of many reasons. Those include remote mail server not responding, remote overloaded and refusing connection, Internet congestion not allowing transaction to complete, user's mailbox full, etc,etc. In any case our mail server retries everything in the queue every 30 minutes for up to 4 days and then automatically deletes the messages and returns an appropriate informative error to the sender. The email I used was 2982 characters in 648 words sent in plain text and html formatting.
12/18/01 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM
Mail server hit hard last night by apparent Spam attack (now we know). POP mail (incoming) access was interrupted and Tech staff was able to restore service after considerable investigation. No mail lost.
11/21/01 1:00 PM
Mail server confused as we upgraded and standardized our mail system. It took us about a day to figure out what our old alternate mail server was doing to our new server.
10/24/01 12:40 PM
Microwave transmission equipment was down for an hour or more cutting off ALL long distance phone lines to Big Bear, including ALL Cell Phone towers and ALL Internet Services. Surprising to see how vulnerable we are.
10/18/01 6:00 PM
Email Server was shut down from 6 PM to 8 PM for addition of hard drive to raid array. It was shut down again for about 15 minutes Friday morning. Upgrade completed.
09/24/01 09:00 AM
Service interrupted from 11 PM 9/23 to 9 AM 9/24 during installation of new dns/mail server, ns1.bbv.net.
09/06/01 08:15 AM
Primary frame relay circuit to the Internet Backbone was down since 2 PM Wednesday. Verio and Verizon worked on it and Verizon found a broken wire in their local office this morning at 8:15. Our Statewide Access Numbers and DSL connections were not affected.
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