Although the Oregon computer server never officially crashed Monday night, an Ethernet problem did slow it down enough to keep people from accessing e-mail Monday evening through Tuesday afternoon.
Operations Manager for Computing Facilities Bill Weiner said Oregon is the main mail server for the University’s faculty and administration. There is also some statistical information stored on Oregon, but it can be found on other campus computer servers as well.
“It is the server most people have their e-mail clients, such as Eudora and Outlook, pointed to,” Weiner said.
The system slowed to a crawl about 8 p.m. Monday. Systems specialists were on-site trying to fix the problem until 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday, at which time Compaq Hardware Services was able to diagnose the problem.
“It looks like an Ethernet interface problem,” said Rick Millhollin, assistant director for computer facilities. “It just slowed so much that everyone thought it was down.”
Millhollin said that although tests indicated an Ethernet cable was working properly, when the cable was replaced the server returned to normal speed and worked without any problems. Millhollin said the situation is a bit of a mystery because the test equipment usually detects any problems.
“The problem’s gone away, but we’re not sure why,” Millhollin said.
The Oregon server began working normally about 1 p.m. Tuesday afternoon.
Millhollin said the Oregon server is at least four years old and is currently being updated. Daisy, another computer server on campus, will be replaced and the old Daisy hardware will become the new Oregon server. The current Oregon server is smaller than the Daisy server.
Despite the fact that the Oregon server was inaccessible for less than a day, departments on campus still experienced some difficulty and frustration.
“We were not able to work on anything,” English Department secretary Susan Dickens said. “It was a little frustrating because we couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t use e-mail or get into Netscape or get into any online forms from OPS and Telcom.”
University President Dave Frohnmayer said that he receives approximately 50 business related e-mails daily. When he returned home from a board meeting Monday night, he experienced the same difficulty in accessing his e-mail as other University faculty.
“I’m used to speedy communications,” he said. “When you can’t access your e-mail, you always have a potentially urgent message.”
Fortunately, this time he had no urgent messages. Frohnmayer said he was grateful to the staff at the computing center who addressed the problem.
“We have such an excellent staff at the Computing Center because they get on top of these things,” he said.