Thought we'd start with a little karaoke to "Early in the Morning", by the Gap Band.

 

Oh, Novell, you know I loved you till you left me

Oh, Novell, you know I cared till you broke down

I was young and smart, I knew what I was doin

I didn't know I lost you till you were gone

 

So I gotta get up early in the morning

To find me a another drive

So I gotta get up early in the morning

To find me another drive

One of the hard drives on the WONC webcast server failed this morning around 2 am.  ITS got the server back up and running by 3 am.  ITS will upgrade the other drives in the system and replace them with larger faster drives.

 

Prod server, which runs all of the student drives such as "F" and "W",  went down at 2:04 am this morning.  (Yes, misery does love company.) ITS has been having trouble with this server, but we were hoping that we could put off doing a major repair until after classes.  Early this morning we had no choice.  ITS started rebuilding the server at 2:10 am this morning and completed the task by 8 am today.  This server and the drives are now up and running.

 

As you all know, ITS was having trouble with the Novell network all of last week.  Many strange things were happening.  There were so many issues that it was hard to pinpoint the problem(s).  Long story short, we had a bad resource that often brought down a server, a finicky server that sometimes went down, and a server that had a failed update.  ITS was trying to juggles these issues while providing a modicum of service.  At times, we lost the battle, like when the printing was not available the first thing Friday morning.  We then had to drop everything and get printing back up---which we did in about 15 minutes.

 

The problems were so severe that we contacted Novell Technical Engineers to help us resolve the problems.  We worked with Novell engineers for 3 days.  We believe that the source of many of these problems were two files that did not copy properly, during a routine upgrade.  The two files were responsible for allowing secure connections via SSL to the server  (allows servers to chit-chat with each other with no one listening in except ITS).  Without those two files ITS couldn't properly administer the server and web services. 

 

The servers are now back to normal working conditions.