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| Outage played number on servers |
Chris Bohle
Senior Staff Writer
Business Affairs Beat |
Jacque Lenz | The Appalachian
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The unusually long power
outage that occurred on campus last Wednesday temporarily rendered
university computer servers out of operation, confusing both students
and faculty.
Dr. Doug B. May, director of Academic Computing
Services, said the servers did not necessarily go down, but merely
lost contact long enough to have to “re-learn” how to perform
some tasks.
“When the server thinks it is talking to you,
but is not, such as the case with the blackout, that’s when it
takes a little time to warm it up again,” said May. “It
took about 30 minutes after the power came on to get things back to
normal.” |
Some of the downstream
networking in some buildings went down for a while, causing the servers
to be a little slow in the re-learning process, said May.
The outage also caused an e-mail delivery problem, as computers were
forced to play catch-up the rest of the day.
“After the outage, the computers were about two hours behind
on mail-delivery,” said May. “We continued to get mail from
off-campus locations, but we were not registering it.”
Although the problem did not last long, some professors experienced
effects of the outage.
Dr. Norman E. Clark, assistant professor in the Department of Communication,
could not login to the server shortly after the blackout.
“All the computers are registered in a specific domain—[the
blackout] must have caused something to go wrong with the registration,”
said Clark. “It all got resolved pretty quickly, though.”
The complexity of the Appalachian State University network played
a large part in the problem, said May.
“We have one of the most sophisticated networks in the UNC System,”
he said. “The intelligence built in is so clever that it takes
some time to recover from something like that.”
This intelligence of the network often creates something of a “good-news,
bad-news” situation, said May.
“It is a good system most of the time—because if [an outage]
is just a temporary hiccup, then the connection will stay constant,”
he said. “But when the longer outage comes, then it’s going
to take longer to get back to normal.”
This blackout was a very unusual circumstance, said May.
“I have been here for 21 years and I do not recall a power outage
ever lasting that long,” he said. “It did not cause any
problems, per se, it just created a setting that violated students’
expectations.” |
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