AU Network Information

All network-based campus computing will be down from Thursday, January 1, 2009 @ 6:00 PM to Sunday, January 4, 2009 @ 8:00 AM.  This outage will allow us to connect two new power generators designed to help us achieve greater overall stability regarding our network-based computing functions.

To be clear, this downtime includes all network-based computing.  i.e. File Services, All GroupWise Functions, Insight, Library Services, PeopleSoft, Moodle, Printing, Internet Access, etc.

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding during this critical event.

ITS Network Team

The Faculty/Staff GroupWise Post Office server was reboot this morning at about 8:30 AM to resolve general slowness within the operating system.  Service was restored at about 8:40 AM.

ITS Network Team

1:28PM:  DHCP has been restored.

ITS Network Team

At approximately 12:50 PM today the primary campus DHCP server stopped functioning properly.  It is begin attended to currently.  Computers begin turned on right now will not be able to access the network until this service is repaired.

ITS Network Team

iFolder has been re-enabled and has begun synchronizing files again.  For those of you using iFolder, you may need to login directly to iFolder again for this to take place.  Simply rebooting your computer and logging in the Novell may be the easiest way to do this.

This is the final step in the restore process.  All available files have now been restored.

ITS Network Team

Yesterday at approximately 2pm one of the Wireless Service Modules in Dunn rebooted.  This interrupted service in Dunn and Smith Halls for 90 to 120 seconds.  This would have caused all wireless devices to loose their network connectivity for the 90 to 120 seconds during the reboot.

ITS Network Team

At 1:00 PM today login was re-enabled.  Several users have discovered that some files are missing.  I’m afraid all available files have been restored.  We have no other repository to pull from.

I mentioned in a previous post that mp3 and wav files would be missing because they were not backup up.  This is not the case.  As it turns out, the exclusions were not in effect and these files were being backed up and have been restored as available.

The iFolder server files are being restored right now.  We hope to enable iFolder client/server synchronization on Friday morning.

We will soon begin re-evaluating are backup systems, policies, and processes.  We will take what we have learned from this problem and past experiences to help us develop more effective backup and disaster recovery solutions.

Once again, thank you for your patience throughout this difficult experience.

ITS Network Team

We anticipate allowing login today at 1:00 PM.  Nearly all files, with the exception of iFolder files, will have been restored by then.

ITS Network Team

The restore process is going well.  We have restored most of the directories and anticipate login being allowed early this afternoon.  At this point your personal websites will be available again, also.

The iFolder server files have not been restored yet and will be restored overnight tonight as to not decrease server performance throughout the rest of today.  You can still access your iFolder files on your local machine.  The server file restore wil allow for synching to begin again.

Note:  As a policy we do not back up mp3 or wav files.  Please be aware that they are not even available to be restored if you had them stored on the Faculty Staff file server.  Other than for academic reasons, it is not appropriate to store these on any campus file server.

Thanks for hanging in there through this situation.

ITS Network Team

After repeated failed attempts to recover the data on the physical disks, we are taking the next step.  This step is to destroy and recreate the entire disk contents, including RAID arrays, partitions, volumes, and data and then restore available data from backup.

This process began about 8:30 this morning and the data restoration began at 11:00 AM.  This will take a long period of time.  Exactly how long we do not know.  We will update you as we know more.

ITS Network Team