As you know we went from 3 servers to process email, network access etc. to one.  As of 4/25 we had end-user applications 100% up.  A second server in now in place, so 2 servers are doing the work of 3 servers.  Email speed has increased and we believe that now it is close to the speed it was before.  The downed email server corrupted a few user profiles and we repaired those files.  Email was delivered more slowly but no email was lost.  This email issue only affected faculty and staff.  Student email was not affected since it is on its own server.

 

We believe the problem is related to hardware.  The email server was up for 12 minutes and then rebooted so it went down and then restarted, which took 3 minutes.  That cycle continually repeated throughout  last Thursday until we took the email server out of the cluster. 

 

What is a cluster and why was the email server in it? Think of the TV show Survivor.   Picture 3 servers on an island.  The servers all agree that when one of them is injured that the other 2 will take over the injured server's duties until it can be healed.  That works fine and then one day, Survivor comes into play.  The 2 servers say, hey this 3rd server is always hurt so lets pass it a poison pill and kill it off.  They do and the email server goes down.  We then reboot the mail server and place it back on the island.  And then the other 2 servers vote it off again.  That is what happened all day and night last Thursday.

 

We will replace the email server this weekend; it was suspect as having a hardware problem because it was the server that kept going down.  We are moving the email server to new hardware which will be a stand alone unit; not associated with the cluster.  You can expect email to have outages on Saturday as we migrate 100 GB of  emails. This process should be completed Saturday.  We were planning to migrate the email to another server this summer but have moved our plans forward.  This summer we will replace the stand alone temporary server that will be in place this weekend with a faster unit. 

 

Over the past few weeks we have had a plethora of emails soliciting faculty and staff. People who receive these emails are unhappy and then notify me.  I then inform the sender that they have violated College Policy and ask them not to spam the campus as it violates College Policy.  Based on the number of these that I've had to deal with, it is time to remind the campus that College email may not be used in direct support of non-college entities, be they business, people, clubs, churches, businesses, charities, family or neighbors, tickets you want to sell, furniture that you want to sell, etc..   The North Central College Statement of Acceptable Use of Information Technologies can be found at this URL http://its.noctrl.edu/tech_ethics/acceptable_use.shtml

 

ITS has worked with Human Resources to set up an opt-in Perks and Discounts email list serve.  Please contact HR for information on how to use it.