Swing Shift ...
Sweet Chariot
They're Coming For to Carry Me Off
I answered the call with my usual thing about Technical Support, my name and "How may I help you?". The lady at the other end said, "Did you know your mail server was down? I think you have a virus?".
I looked down the screen at the row of happy monkey faces, each one representing a mail server. If one of the servers had been stressed, which has been happening a few times each day, one monkey face would have been replaced with a flaming spiderman face. If one of the servers had gone down, the corresponding face would have shown a green goblin ... but that hasn't happened since I got there. I looked farther down the screen. None of the eight outgoing mail servers had even a moderate load. Nor was there any sign of problems on any of the nearly 400 servers we monitor for outside customers.
A green goblin is just one of many emergency conditions we are constantly monitoring for. We have alarms and horns and bells to bring specific conditions to our attention, so that our area sometimes sounds like a sound effects studio. If something had gone wrong I would have called an engineer. If I couldn't get an engineer, however unlikely that might be, I would call the Technical Services Manager and, if he was unavailable, I would start in on the list of company Vice Presidents until I got somebody there who could handle the problem. We don't ignore server problems.
I asked the lady why she thought we might have a problem. She said she had tried to sign on to our Webmail service and had gotten a strange error message instead of being able to sign on. It was a message I had never heard of before. She insisted that everything had been running well when she went on vacation in June, that she hadn't changed anything on her system and that the problem was therefore at our end. When I asked what software she used to access Webmail, she told me she used Netscape 4.6.
There is a lot of HTML out there that older versions of Netscape browsers have problems with. I told her this. She immediately misunderstood and accused me of having said that we no longer supported her browser, an accusation she continued to repeat as I tried to help her. I did convince her to upgrade to a more recent version, though, since it is free except for the time required to download the new software.
It turns out that my suggestion should solve her problem, but I didn't know that and I didn't know why.
This is an aside on a slightly different problem which happens frequently: a customer goes on vacation. Everything was working when they left but they can't get to their email when they get back. That is because their alloted storage has filled up and the system chokes when it tries to download messages to the customer's system. We have to ask the customer to access the mail with Webmail until he has deleted enough messages that the system can function properly. Usually the problems start when the customer reaches 70% of capacity, so he has to get rid of about 30% of the accumulated mail to get back to normal.
I continued to research her problem after she was off the line. The first indication I got was that the problem, mysterious and intermittent by nature, seemed related to the amount of virtual memory available. Microsoft had issued a fix specific to the problem for Windows 95 and clearing the browser cache and system temporary files sometimes fixed it.
Then I had a second customer with a similar complaint. He was more reasonable and clearing his cache seemed to fix his problem, but I did some more research.
Bingo! With older versions of Netscape, accumulating exactly 1024 temporary files of a specific form causes the problem. Clearing out the temporary files (or upgrading to a more recent version) fixes the problem.
Why 1024? Because sometimes, to a computer, that number in binary looks like zero. If they don't detect an overflow condition when they count to 1024 and think the value is zero, strange things may happen. Because it doesn't happen very often, the condition may remain a mystery for a long time before somebody figures out what happened.
Comments (2)
Computer problems can be so frustrating! It's hard to believe that it was not that many years ago that we did not have email or spend half our lives online. Now when something goes wrong, we think the world has ended.
We changed ISP's because of email problems. It seems our old provider put in spam filters. Nice idea. The only problem was that we still got the spam, but none of the people we WANTED to hear from could get through. They kept telling us that we had to notify our friends to contact their ISP's and have them contact our ISP to straighten out the problem. It seems like just a little too much trouble to say to someone "Here is my email addy. I would love to hear from you, but first you will have to have your ISP get permission from my ISP for your email to get through." We struggled with the problem for 2 years, and then we finally changed ISP's. (No - we are not masochistic or terminally stupid - we live in a very small community and did not have any other choice for that 2 years. We switched as soon as we had the opportunity.) Anyway, problem solved!
A-ha! You have been posting, just not on LJ....
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