GCN Circular 515

As some of you may have already noticed, GCN operations have resumed
after the outage over the end-of-year period (the outage was announced
in a notice that was distributed 21 Dec 99). 

GCN NOTICES:
The GCN Notice system (BATSE, XTE, SAX, etc burst location Notices)
went off-line at UT midnight 30 Dec 1999 and resumed full operations
about 21:00 UT 02 Jan 2000 (about 2.9 days lost).  The real-time BATSE
telemetry data was also down during this interval, so I don't know how many
or the significance of any bursts during that interval (that information
will be availabe a few days from now when the BATSE team processes their 
normal data deliveries).  And since the network connections in/out of Gaddard
were also down, the GCN system could not receive any positions from
the other contributing spacecraft -- but presumably their operations were
also off-line during this interval.  There was one minor Y2K non-compliance
which was fixed within 2 hours.

GCN CIRCULARS:
The GCN Circular machine went off-line about 20:00 UT 30 Dec 1999
and resumed operations about 15:00 UT 03 Jan 2000.  During this period
it could not receive submissions, nor make any distributions of Circulars.
As many of you noticed, there was a Y2K problem with the year
in the DATE field for Circulars 513 and 514.  The system administrators
that maintain the Circulars computer (lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov) thought
it was Y2K compliant.  I have installed a work-around in the Circulars
procesing program which handles this non-compliance.  I have also adjusted
the year in the dates of the two Circulars in the archived copies.

MISC:
There has been a significant increase in the number of bounced email
messages from both the Notices and the Circulars.  Presumably this is due
to machines, routers, and networks being off-line around the world.
If you think you may have missed a Notice/Circular, then please check
with the archived version in the GCN web site (http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn).

My apologies to those who receive this twice.  I am sending it to all
active sites in the Notices "sites.cfg" file and to all receivers on
the Circulars distribution list.  The overlap factor is about 0.6.


Best wishes to everyone in this new year/decade/century/millennium,
Scott


Scott Barthelmy                      NASA-GSFC, Code 661, Greenbelt, MD   20771
PHONE:  301-286-3106                 (work)
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