Saturday, September 9, 2000

N E W S

As Penn State server freezes, work slows Outage cuts off access to e-mail, Web pages

By RYAN DOUGHERTY Centre Daily Times

UNIVERSITY PARK - Penn State senior Matthew John awoke early Friday and headed to the Pollock computer lab, scrambling to complete the computer science project he expected to finish the night before.

The reason? The university's file server was down Thursday afternoon, causing a communication breakdown with one of John's group members.

"I couldn't get Eudora (e-mail program) working and couldn't get the project done," John said. "I was expecting an e-mail from a group member and did not get it in time. So I had to rush today to get it done."

Between 10:30 a.m. and 3:45 p.m. Thursday, the university's main server was down, preventing students and employees from sending e-mail from Penn State accounts, officials said.

The university's Web pages were also not accessible, but students still received non-Penn State e-mail and had access to outside Web sites.

"It was the first outage like that in 10 years," Penn State spokesman Tysen Kendig said Friday. "It was a series of software and hardware problems, but it was fixed without major disruption.

"It was more of an inconvenience than anything," Kendig said.

Officials are working with Internet vendors to prevent that kind of outage from happening again, according to a notice on the university's Web site.

Such problems have happened in the past and will happen again, said J. Gary Augustson, vice provost for information technology. However, the goal is to minimize the glitches.

"We had some serious problems (Thursday) ..." Augustson said. "Our problem happens when the Internet itself becomes congested."

That congestion causes delays in Penn State's getting its traffic out to the Internet, he said, leading to a backup in the university's systems and a series of problems.

Although the outage hampered e-mail sharing and temporarily wiped out university Web pages, students in the Pollock Lab were relatively calm, said Steve Warren, a Center for Academic Computing consultant.

"Surprisingly, since e-mail was down," Warren said, adding that only about five or six students came to the computer lab help desk with queries.

Ryan Dougherty can be reached at 231-4631 and rdougher@centredaily.com

CDT staff writer Erin Wengerd contributed to this story

http://web.centredaily.com/content/centredaily/2000/09/09/news_local/853725.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), September 09, 2000