2008 Woodie Awards
Campus e-mail down for three days... and counting
Cassie Rupp
Issue date: 11/16/06 Section: Front Page
- Page 1 of 1
A hardware malfunction has suspended e-mail access for more than 700 college employees. The college's e-mail system failed around 2 p.m. Monday.
According to Mary Wilson, director of information technology, the failure was caused by the server, which contains six storage discs set side-by-side. Two discs in the middle of the RAID array, a grouping of drives that holds the data, failed, causing the system to shut down. The first disc failed about one month ago.
The discs, which are hard to obtain, cost between $200 and $300.
"The system was put together about three years ago and with the advance in technology, the drives that were installed at the time are very hard to find at this point," Wilson said.
The network manager contacted Alexander Open Systems, experienced consultants and systems experts, to work on the server yesterday evening to find a temporary solution.
Wilson said the college previously had plans to rebuild the exchange server and increase the storage for each of the mailboxes. She said these plans will still be installed after the e-mail system has a temporary solution.
"We were looking at building a new one and transferring all the data," she said. "It's just a little more desperate at this point."
There is a possibility that employees will lose data he or she had saved in their email, but according to Wilson, "that is not a proven fact at this point in time."
She added that the drives that are down have to be replaced,
"It should, if everything works well, rebuild its array and the data should be OK," Wilson said.
E-mails sent after Monday afternoon are going into the main server and not being distributed. It will be held for three days, then it will bounce back to the sender as undeliverable.
Although e-mail has been inaccessible, the network is still up and running.
"It's not the network," Wilson said. "They [employees] still have complete access to Internet, faculty have access to their grading software, Blackboard, everything except e-mail."
Several factors including time, electrical, or something on the disc could all be the cause.
"It could be a variety of things," Wilson said. "I doubt it's over usage. It could be electrical, it could just be something bad on the disc originally."
According to Mary Wilson, director of information technology, the failure was caused by the server, which contains six storage discs set side-by-side. Two discs in the middle of the RAID array, a grouping of drives that holds the data, failed, causing the system to shut down. The first disc failed about one month ago.
The discs, which are hard to obtain, cost between $200 and $300.
"The system was put together about three years ago and with the advance in technology, the drives that were installed at the time are very hard to find at this point," Wilson said.
The network manager contacted Alexander Open Systems, experienced consultants and systems experts, to work on the server yesterday evening to find a temporary solution.
Wilson said the college previously had plans to rebuild the exchange server and increase the storage for each of the mailboxes. She said these plans will still be installed after the e-mail system has a temporary solution.
"We were looking at building a new one and transferring all the data," she said. "It's just a little more desperate at this point."
There is a possibility that employees will lose data he or she had saved in their email, but according to Wilson, "that is not a proven fact at this point in time."
She added that the drives that are down have to be replaced,
"It should, if everything works well, rebuild its array and the data should be OK," Wilson said.
E-mails sent after Monday afternoon are going into the main server and not being distributed. It will be held for three days, then it will bounce back to the sender as undeliverable.
Although e-mail has been inaccessible, the network is still up and running.
"It's not the network," Wilson said. "They [employees] still have complete access to Internet, faculty have access to their grading software, Blackboard, everything except e-mail."
Several factors including time, electrical, or something on the disc could all be the cause.
"It could be a variety of things," Wilson said. "I doubt it's over usage. It could be electrical, it could just be something bad on the disc originally."
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