News - Sep 2007

Sep 29 2007 - We had a serious problem with one of the "back end" servers that comprise mailserv on Friday from about 5:30pm until midnight. The good news is that no user data was lost.

An array of disks that we had added last week to improve performance froze up without not ice around 5:30pm. Several attempts to reset the devices and reboot the server failed to clear up the problem. We spent several hours investigating the problem, which was among the most difficult we've seen in years. Ultimately we discovered that an older SCSI (I/O) cable that we had used to connect the extra disks was behind the very sporadic and seemingly unexplainable behavior we were seeing. We now believe it was a mistake to use an older cable that was not designed to handle the speeds of new SCSI disk devices.

We sincerely apologize for any inconveniences causes by this outage - which gives us new motivation to move forward with long overdue plans to replace some of the older mailserv back end servers and disk drives.

Sep 16 2007 - Blackboard was down for maintenance on Sunday, September 16, from approximately 6 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. We replaced broken memory modules. While doing this we encountered another problem with the configuration of the hardware. With assistance from our hardware service vendor we repaired this problem also. We have redundant servers for Blackboard but unfortunately they share files which reside on the machine which required service.

Sep 16 2007 - Mailserv will be down for system work tonight 12:01am-2am (i.e. early Monday morning).

Sep 14 2007 - Blackboard will be down for maintenance on Sunday, September 16, from 6 A.M. to 11 A.M. We will be replacing broken memory modules. We have redundant servers for Blackboard but unfortunately they all share files which reside on the machine which requires service.

Sep 12 2007 - Our LDAP server dealing with the public whitepages suffered a corrupted database. We're recovering from backup now.

This affects the Phonbook search from the UIC web page, and some email clients that might do direct ldap lookups. It does not affect logons and passwords.

Sep 12 2007 - The ldap whitepages database has been restored, and is functioning again.