E-mail systems down

Netnews, Dolphin,Netnews, Dolphin,Eniac face problems Three of the University's Internet systems were closed for unrelated reasons this week, which Associate Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing Dan Updegrove blamed on "bad luck." Dolphin, the server for most graduate schools and the Nursing School, was inaccessible from 1:30 p.m. Monday until Tuesday night. Eniac, the server for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, also experienced minor problems Monday. And Netnews, which provides Internet users at the University with access to newsgroups, was down for most of Friday. Dolphin services include e-mail and personal home pages for the Dental, Education, Fine Arts, Law, Social Work and Veterinary Graduate Schools and the undergraduate Nursing School. In addition, Dolphin contains e-mail accounts and home pages for many student groups. According to Updegrove, the Dolphin crash was due to a system malfunction. "The malfunction was sufficiently severe as to result in lost user data," he said. Students on the Dolphin server who received e-mail from 2 a.m. Sunday until 2 p.m. Monday lost any unsaved mail. Updegrove said the added space will allow the system to stay on line longer if this situation reoccurs. Eniac was down for only 15 minutes on Monday -- but during this time, it took one particularly valuable file with it. "When the system crashed, the file containing student passwords was deleted," said Ira Winston, director of computing for the School of Engineering. But because the password file was backed up at approximately 4 a.m. Monday, the file was not lost. However, any password changes made by students between 4 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Monday did not take effect and need to be re-entered. The Netnews problem resulted from a malfunction with the "expire" program, which is designed to delete old postings in order to keep disk space available for new ones. According to Updegrove, the University receives 500 to 700 megabytes in new postings each day. Since the University's disk was full, the server was unable to accept new messages. Since the crash, Information Systems and Computing upgraded its system by expanding the storage space. Meanwhile, Penn InTouch, a World Wide Web service that gives students on-line access to their transcripts, financial information and course schedules, remains off line. The service was pulled off the Web last week following a potential security breach of Netscape, the University-supported web browser. Updegrove said the fixed version of Netscape was scheduled to become available yesterday. However, the University will not put Penn InTouch back on line until it has a chance to test the new Netscape software.

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