The RUC-2 problems over 10/30-10/31 were a result of communications
problem at NCEP that caused the eta-32 to fail. Once the RUC no longer
had valid boundary condition grids (or rather when it began to have
invalid ones), it began to fail. To address this issue we are adding
the capability to use the AVN grids for the boundary if the eta becomes
unavailable.
Obviously we'd prefer to use the eta-32, but will now have the capablility
to manually fall back to the AVN.

A couple of other short outages have been experienced over the last week,
including an OSO outage and a file server failure at FSL, but these were
quickly corrected. Many thanks to the operational and network staff at
NCEP, OSO and FSL.