Jon Bloom has provided the following explanation of our overnight email server problem.

Dave K1ZZ

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Last night, shortly after 5:30 PM EDT, our Exchange mail server failed.

Service was restored shortly after 9 AM this morning. In the process, we may have lost up to 1/2 hour worth of messages that had been delivered to the system between 5 PM and 5:30 PM last night. Messages that were received at HQ after the Exchange server failed last night were held in an incoming queue and delivered once the system came back up this morning.

The technical details are as follows: The disk virus scanner running on the Exchange server detected a virus signature in one of the Exchange database log files and deleted that file. (This is not something the virus scanner should do, and we have since reconfigured it to prevent a recurrence of this error.) We tried recovering the database in-place, but that failed. So, using our snapshot backups, we restored the database as it was at 5 PM yesterday and successfully restarted the server.

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Jon Bloom, KE3Z

Information Technology Manager

ARRL - The national association for Amateur Radio

225 Main St.

Newington, CT 06109

860-594-0276