CIT installs new software to prevent system failure

By CHRISTINE VIDAL
News Services Editor

UB's central email server was shut down again briefly this week to allow Computing and Information Technology to install software that should prevent a system failure similar to the one that occurred Feb. 3 from happening again.

According to Hinrich Martens, associate vice president for computing and information technology, the problem that caused the crash, crippling email service at UB for nearly two weeks, has been identified by Veritas, the company that supplied the server's software.

"We're certainly very relieved that this has been identified and pinpointed and we're also certainly relieved that email has been restored," Martens said.

Veritas notified UB on Friday that the system-wide failure was indeed caused by the number of files on the server, which had grown to more than 8.5 million files.

CIT personnel are relieved that the source of the problem has been found, and that the software company's findings "confirm what we'd suspected...(and) confirm that we took the right tact when we divided the file system" into 12 smaller files because the problem was "clearly related to size," Martens said.

Veritas has provided UB with a "fix," or software patch that was installed early Tuesday morning to prevent the problem from occurring again. Sending customers a "fix" is a common practice when a problem has been identified by a software manufacturer, he said.

Given what the university was up against, Martens said he felt the software problem had been identified in "a very reasonable time frame."

In fact, given the severity of the server crash, he said he thought things had been handled as well as they possibly could have been. And while the reaction of the university community could have been vitriolic, feedback has been "amazingly positive...very understanding and very sympathetic, except for a few isolated exceptions," he said.

"We've been able to do pretty well in living through and surviving this process," Martens added.

As he had indicated earlier, Martens said a campus-wide committee has been set up to review the approach that was taken in restoration of the university's central email server and recommend changes, including possible long-term changes such as replacement of the system, if that is deemed necessary. That committee was scheduled to hold its preliminary meeting this week.

While some members of the university community found two weeks without email to be a huge disruption, others barely noticed, especially departments that use a separate email server.

Such was the case with the Office of Admissions, which receives an average of 80 email messages a day from prospective students, said Mary Weatherston, assistant director of admissions marketing communications.

If admissions had been on the central email server, "we would have had an awful lot of annoyed prospective students. They would have thought we were ignoring them, and how would they have known (differently)?" she asked.

Some inquiries received by admissions may have been affected, she noted, since many of the messages the office receives are forwarded to another department for a reply. If those departments were on UB's central email server, the answers obviously would have been delayed.

Electronic communication in the student-services node also continued pretty much as usual because people in that area all are on a separate server and were not affected by the crash, said Susan Eck, coordinator of the student services information technology node.

Except Eck, herself, that is.

Ironically, she was the only one in the node who had opted for an "acsu" account and lost her email during the two-week period when the server was down.

It wasn't entirely a bad thing, Eck said.

"I spoke to people I've never spoken to on the phone before," she said, noting these were people whom she emails on a regular basis and has met from time to time in meetings, but has never actually conversed with on the telephone.

Even classes that rely heavily on technology were able to carry on without major disruption.

John Ellison, associate professor of information and library studies, uses distance learning to teach a number of his classes. While the server crash had an impact on communication with students who attend his classes in remote locations, the courses themselves are delivered over a WebBulletinBoard, and were not impacted by the email problems, he said.

But "students were unable to reach me via their email accounts at UB so we lost nearly a week of 'personal communication time,' which is a significant part of teaching via distance learning," he said.

Ellison has an email account through a local Net server in addition to his UB email address.

"I have never had a problem with my local Net server. My UB email address is available and used by some students and faculty to reach me. However, the UB account is forwarded to my local Net server. Should one account go down, students and my colleagues can nearly always reach me," he said.

Unfortunately, his students who have just a UB account were at a disadvantage while the central server was down.

"Many students working on course-related research projects develop their design methodology in cooperation with me via email. Those with only UB email accounts lost their ability to reach me during the time the email system was down," Ellison said.

The temporary loss of email was not completely without benefit, though.

"On the up-side of the UB email down time, I was able to focus more on my own academic projects, since neither my colleagues nor students could reach me," he said.