Hello Everybody,

We're making progress in off peak times but on peak times are slowing
or reversing progress.  To be clear, none of our new equipment is in
use yet and we still are under the same I/O constraints that
precipitated the issues to begin with.  We've been able to make
progress on several fronts despite these constraints.  However, we're
committed to fixing any and all service issues.  Here's where we are
today:

-The Support Forum is operational again after a database failure.
Despite how tempting it is to leave it down so the flames are
minimized - we give you this open forum to vent ALL your support needs :-).

-About 20% of our new gear has arrived and is racked.  About half of that is
powered and networked.  We're working on this over the next few days, then
we'll start burning it in.  We likely be using it by the weekend, but in
non-user facing ways to flush out any problems.

-The remaining 80% (of the over 250,000 IOPS and 500 TB we're adding)
is beginning to ship on Wednesday  - about 20% per day.

-AutoUnrar - The main issue here is the paradox of having more content
to store, but nowhere to usably store it.  Progress will be varied
here until we get all the new gear in.  But we push on.  Through
retention adjustments and continued progress, AutoUnrars are being
decoded faster today than over the weekend and we can likely process
all of the remaining archives by Wednesday.  There is a backlog of
Unrars that remains to be processed.

-Old indexes are being repaired and should be operational now.  These
indexes were never designed to handle more than 50 days of retention
and take a while to fix/generate even with 50 days.  Please contact
Support with any new issues.

-We're decomissioning the old news.easynews.com NNTP gear to make room
for the new web gear.  We're making the Beta NNTP sites live next
Monday.

-App Status is almost complete and will released later this week.
http://www.easynews.com/appstatus/
App Status will help communicate status on the major services
that Easynews has. (Most of which you can't get at any other provider).

We expect peak times on Saturday and Sunday to cause slowness and
timeouts as even though our filesystem had a good week, demand is
heavy on the weekend.  Between 18:00 and 02:00 GMT is expected to be
the hardest hit.

-Slow downloads.
-Slow clearing Decoding backlog.
-Connection timeouts or disconnections.
-Missing content.

Workarounds:

-You can use the Beta NNTP farms.
-You can schedule downloads to occur between 06:00 and 14:00 GMT when
our system load is the least.  Weekdays are lower than weekends.

We continue to make progress and will keep you updated as we hit milestones.

Thanks,
Boromir

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