Coral e-mail system down for six hours yesterday

A hardware failure early yesterday morning caused the coral e-mail server to be inaccessible. The outage initially seemed easily fixable, but upon further investigation the problem was more difficult to resolve, according to University officials.

About 9:00 a.m. yesterday, the hardware which supports Coral crashed. The University Systems Group (USG) expected the outage to last an hour.

USG re-evaluated the situation at 10:30 but was unable to determine when the system would be functional. Director of Information and Technology Infrastructure Lesley Tolman said that throughout the day USG attempted to reboot the system several times. "We were able to learn more about the problem though these attempts."

Tolman said the University "corroborated with Sun Microsystems and came up with similar diagnoses." The University's service contract with Sun Microsystems includes technical support for these sorts of situations.

Though the exact cause of the problem remains unknown, Tolman said that "a hardware failure is pretty definitive." To save time, the "offending parts were removed and replaced."

The complete restoration of the system took over nine hours. By 2:15 p.m., however, many students were able to use their e-mail again.

Doug Herrick, the associate director of data network operations, said that Sun Microsystems had to rush replacement hardware parts to the University in order to replace the failed parts.

Though the announcement was posted on Info board, a support specialist said many students were still confused.

The message that appears on the Coral homepage when a log in is attempted simply stated that the login has failed and that the user's password may be incorrect.

The specialist noted that by 1:00 p.mm USG had already received 30 telephone calls and ten emails. Many students were concerned their accounts had expired.

By 4:30 p.m. yesterday the system had successfully rebooted and was completely restored.

On Sunday there was also a failure with the Webmail, however because it was early in the morning, few students were affected. Tolman believes this may have been related, though the extent was not as severe.

The Coral e-mail server contains mostly student accounts. The only staff members on the server are recent graduates who work at the University. It is independent from the Granite server which manages faculty e-mail.

Many students were inconvenienced by the problem. Sophomore Steve Hoghe said, "It's awful, I worked in Eaton for four hours on my problem set and then couldn't print it out at home because email wasn't working."

Senior Brian Friedlich was also academically affected, though less seriously. "The professor was accommodating about the assignment, I can turn it in as soon as email starts working."

Junior Jordan Edwards was relying on his e-mail to confirm appointments. "I was expecting several time-sensitive e-mails about meetings, I'm still not sure if I missed them, or if they even happened," he said.