Problems add up with SAS e-mail server

With a senior-society application due the next day, College senior Neha Sharma faced one last challenge: her e-mail.

Set to leave town, Sharma would not have access to e-mail for the weekend, but her School of Arts and Sciences e-mail account refused to cooperate that Friday evening. Again.

After Sharma had tried several times for two hours, her e-mail, which she accesses through a Web browser "was definitely not working," she said.

Officials say they are not exactly sure what caused the most recent service disruption. But for the third time in five weeks, SAS students had problems accessing their e-mail accounts.

So many students called the computing help desk that a voice message was posted saying that the server was down. Previous e-mail service disruptions since the beginning of this semester occurred on Aug. 24 and Sept. 1.

A hardware glitch last Friday caused a machine key to the e-mail system's operation to fail, said John Yates, the information technology senior director for SAS Computing. A similar problem caused the e-mail server to be shut down on Aug. 24 as well.

The machine in question is a mail server that sits in a building at 34th and Walnut streets that holds a terabyte of disk storage -- roughly as much space as is found on 2,000 audio CDs in their original format.

Because software is used to run the e-mail server's highly active systems, glitches do occur, but it is unusual that there would be multiple service interruptions in such a short period of time, Yates said.

"It's concerning, of course, to us too, but I think it's just a luck of the draw," he said. "It's unfortunate so many [service interruptions ] happened in such a short period of time. We are doing everything we can to prevent that sort of thing."

Unlike the internal glitches that caused the most recent service interruption, the problem that arose on Sept. 1 was due to a change in servers.

When students type in the Web address for Webmail, Yates said, they are directed to the e-mail server's Internet protocol address. With a new server, the IP address changed. However, not every system was up-to-date, with the result that some computers that could not access Webmail for a time.

For on-campus computers, the changes were quickly registered, while off-campus computers took longer, Yates said.

Although the breaks in service are a nuisance, students like Sharma were not too upset. To get her application in on time, she gave a copy to her brother to e-mail for her.

"If it's working most of the time, I won't be antagonistic about it," she said.

The SAS computing office has a servicing agreement with the vendor involved to investigate what happened and prevent problems in the future.

Strike three - Sept. 23: Hardware glitch causes e-mail server to be shut down - Sept. 1: Some computers could not access Webmail due to a change in servers - Aug. 24: Hardware glitch causes e-mail server to be shut down

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