TO:  All GCN Notice recipient sites                    21 Jul 06
RE:  GCN Website offline this weekend

A few statements about GCN Operations (recent and future):

1) GCN will be off-line tomorrow/Saturday (22 Jul 06)
starting 14:00 UT and lasting possibly as long as 22:00 UT.
The Goddard-wide Network is being upgraded.
This will disable all GCN Notices and Circulars.
There is a chance that there will also be an outage
1 week later (Sat, 29 Jul 06).

2) The recent security problems in Building 2 of Goddard
(where the GCN machine is located) have been 99% solved.
There were some brief outages (see the 15jul06 announcement below).
I have had to do some scrambling to keep up with the many changes
the IT Network/Security people have implemented,
but I think everything is back to normal operations for GCN.

3) One additional outcome of the security problems and port closures
was the loss of the NTP Time Server.  As such, the GCN computer
stopped receiving time updates and this resulted in the some strange values
in the NOTICE_DATE timestamps in the outgoing email Notices
for GRBs 060717 and 060719 (~5 and ~25 sec ahead of the GRB_DATE, resp).
Please note that this drifting time affected ONLY the NOTICE_DATE;
not the GRB_DATE (which comes from the various spacecraft).
The time server is now back in operation.


> The computer network in the building 2 here at Goddard
> in which GCN resides suffered a security breach.
> Part of the initial response to that breach was to install
> firewall blocks on all incoming/outgoing traffic
> with the exception for some holes for the GCN socket sites and
> for email.  But everything else is blocked.  As such, you will not
> be able to get to the GCN website this weekend.
> 
> I expect this blockage to be lifted early this week (Monday?),
> but I will not know more until the network/admin people start 
> working the problem again on Monday.
> 
> There were two brief socket outages (a 23-min outage starting
> at 22:37 UT 14jul06 and a 33-min outage starting 14:11 UT 15jul06)
> when the firewall blocks were installed and a further adjustment.
> These were brief and no bursts happened during these outages.
> 
> Again, all the Notices and Circulars functionality of GCN is 
> still working -- only the website is off-line.