May 20, 2002 – May 20, 2002 – OnePaper Inc., the platform for St. Thomas Source, St. Croix Source and St. John Source, came back online Monday afternoon, allowing many readers access to the Internet newspapers, which had been inaccessible since Friday.
It was the longest interruption in the more than three-year history of the Source, the islands' Internet newspapers.
Feedback Monday afternoon indicated that Source readers in the territory, in New York and in California were able to access the newspapers; however, there also were a number of reports from within the territory and in Florida of readers still unable to access the publications.
Evan Edwards, technician for OnePaper, said Monday afternoon that the reason for the inconsistency was that "some ISP's [Internet Service Providers] can access OnePaper now, and some cannot. Some aren't aware that the server has moved."
He said the "worst case scenario" would be that it could take up to six hours more for some Internet users to access the Source pages, as their ISP's routinely update their cache of information.
Among those still not able to access the pages as of mid-afternoon Monday was Source senior editor Jean Etsinger. For that reason, further delays were anticipated in posting stories that have been reported over the past four days. "We will get the information out as soon as is physically possible," Etsinger said.
Edwards reported to the Source Sunday night that "the database is offline but will be online by tomorrow, Monday, at the latest."
Since Friday, some Internet users trying to access the Source newspapers had been greeted with a banner above an otherwise blank page that read: "In order to provide better service, OnePaper is currently upgrading our servers. Service should be restored within a few hours."
Edwards told the Source some time ago that he had anticipated that the scheduled work to upgrade the system would be "seamless," with no interruption in service. But on Sunday night, he said the interruption "was unanticipated and occurred as I was physically moving the backup servers from Florida to the new server location," in Nashville, Tenn.
"The function of the backup servers is to prevent events like this from occurring in the future," he said.
Edwards said it appeared that "the major cause" of the interruption in service was that one OnePaper client "uploaded a large image that filled the inbound partition of the new server." He said he was taking steps to limit the size of uploads "as a stopgap measure to prevent this from occurring."
Laurence A. Searles of V.I. Access, a popular ISP in the Virgin Islands, said Monday afternoon that V.I. Access had not experienced any interruptions in service during the period since Friday "in regards to reaching the Source through us." V.I. Access also is in the midst of upgrading its system, Searles said, but this is a process that began about 30 days ago and is expected to take about another 30 days with no anticipated interruptions to customers.
"There has been no interruption in our service that I've been aware of," he said.
