misc issues

[Predrag Punosevac]

Dear Autonians,

Several of you have e-mailed me so I will give you here quick heads up
instead of replaying individually.

Our OpenVPN server (just the application not the physical machine) has
shut down after the uptime of 400 days. That in turn resulted in
non-availability of bash.autonlab.org.

Also all desktops were affected as NFS mounts became unavailable and
internal DNS server unreachable (that caused your browsers to work
slowly). 

Just to asure you that I have things under control I even have a hot
spare OpenVPN gateway which could be put in production within 20 minutes
(I would have to restart your OpenVPN clients). I could also configure
your OpenVPN clients to use two OpenVPN servers but that is just
complicating things for no real reason. 

Now Athena was reported down. It has never been down. However all
virtual machines have shutdown. I have no explanation why that has
happen. They are now backup and running but Jarod will have to check few
of those. 

lop1.autonlab.org is non-responsive due to your local DNS issues. That
has nothing to do with my machines. You have to check with your DNS
provider. I have repeatedly loged from my home without any delays.

Predrag