System crash kills campus e-mail

Thousands of student and faculty e-mail inboxes were empty for two days last week after a system-wide crash shut down campus on-line services.

According to Patrick Lathrop, senior systems software specialist for SF State's computing services department, he walked into his office Wednesday morning and discovered a component in the operating system had shut down the entire system.
"The operating system's software disk mirroring component failed in a catastrophic fashion," Lathrop said.

Lathrop reinstalled the operating system without the mirroring component to get the on-line services functioning again.

But the glitch in the system was enough to require a massive backup that computer technicians are still dealing with this week.

According to David Golden, an information technology consultant, the damage caused by the failure was repairable, but e-mail messages sent late Tuesday afternoon could not be retrieved.

"Nothing major happened," Golden said, "but there was a brief period Tuesday when (e-mail) was lost."

Golden, who runs Academic Computing's help desk, said they were flooded with calls from students and faculty who use campus e-mail.

"We had a ton of people asking what went wrong," Golden said. "But once they realized the system would be up and working (the next day), it was no big deal."

According to Golden, the crash came at a time when many SF State students were trying to set up new Internet accounts, causing a backlog in registration.

Golden said existing account users were not able to log on to the campus servers, and could not check their e-mail Wednesday and part of Thursday.

At the Media Access Center in the main library, however, Wednesday was chaotic.
John Humphries, manager of the computer lab at the library, said all networks in the lab were down, which included all word processing programs.

"We couldn't do anything," Humphries said. "We had to shut down for two hours."
Humphries said the shut down in his networks that day were not solely caused by the operating system failure, but also by adjustments he had made to the system.
Nonetheless, students are still reporting problems.

On Tuesday afternoon, Humphries was helping a woman who had logged in to her e-mail account and found 740 new messages in her inbox addressed to other people.

"These things happen," John True, executive director of Computing Services, said.
True said within 24 hours the system was working and compared the failure to the electrical blackout earlier this month that affected seven states in the West.
With more than 16,000 Internet accounts registered on the SF State system, and an influx of new students who are encouraged by instructors to get e-mail accounts, True said the importance of electronic communications was highlighted by the failure.
"You don't miss your water 'til the well runs dry," True said. "This makes us realize how dependent we are on e-mail."

[ Golden Gater Online September 5, 1996 ]

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