We're back up. Since about 7PM or so. Just got back into the office from our Network Operations Center and the last order of business before crashing is to let you all know we stabalized the servers around 7:00PM for service. Our pictures server is back up and running and therefore Auctions have been posting since around then. We had an unrelated double whammy as we also lost a SQL server today and therfore couldn't accept bids for most of the day. Internal mail was also affected, so if you tried to send on and didn't get your confirming copy, to be certain, please resend it.

More good news is that no auctions were lost so shouldn't experience the problems like we saw 2 weeks ago when we did loose some autions.>/p>

Appreciate your understanding and cooperation while we were whipping all the little electronic gremlins back in place.

As a young Ensign I worked for a old Destroyer Squadron Commodore. He had a saying that has always stayed with me, I guess because it's so true. He liked to say "One Aw, S**t is worth about 1,000 Atta boys".

Well we've earned a few technical "Aw, S**ts this month and are painfully aware of the quality service "Atta Boys" we burned up in the process.

We are making some expensive and extensive changes in our server complex to manage down the impact to our customers' perceived service levels when the inevitable but unforseeable server failure occurs.

We are building robust redundantcy and fail-over features into our systems. We are searching out and eliminating and/or correcting all "single point of failure" potential and are enhancing our back-up procedures and capabilities. This will take a little time but should be completed within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, our system, which over the past year (up until the past two weeks) has been very stable and with a very good historical level of "up time", will continue to serve you, we think as capably as it has in the past (prior to these recent server issues.

We have a goal of giving you the "dial tone" every time you hit our site, so much so that you will literally take it for granted and never have to give it another thought. As our technical solution comes on line we think you'll be getting that level of internet service.

Now, my technical expertise in these matters is usually surpassed by those of a broken red brick, so I can't get into all the neat techno bable details my partners could tell you all about (high "eye-glaze" factor for me). However, I do understand a bit about risk analysis and system process evaluation and think we've hit on a pretty "Aw, S**t" proof solution.