Firstclass Server Failure Brings School to Grinding Halt
By Peter Gault ‘07
News Staff Reporter
At 12:15 Am, on Tuesday, April 11th, Choate’s FirstClass server crashed. Service was returned at 6 AM on Wednesday by Mr. Mark Berretta and Mr. Tom Hulley from the Information & Technology Services department at Choate. The server crash prevented all the members of the Choate Rosemary Hall community from accessing their FirstClass email accounts. Additionally, the crash exposed some of the strengths and weakness of the Information & Technology Services Department.
The FirstClass service went down because of a hardware malfunction. In an email to the school on Thursday, April 13th, Andrw Speyer ITS detailed the reason for the crash. “A piece of hardware called the RAID controller, the device that controls the disks, failed and caused the server to freeze,” Mr. Speyer said. To remedy the problem, the ITS department had to transfer the data from the old server to a new server. This process took over 12 hours, for the old server needed to be brought up, and have the data transferred, before it would crash again. Mr. Berretta and Mr. Hulley worked through the entire night to bring the servers online by 6 AM the next day. Incoming email was not lost since it was held on a Linux system before being transferred to the FirstClass server.
The failed server brought Choate to a halt. Teachers could not send messages to their students and Administrators could not communicate. The News could not publish since it did not have access to its articles. Information about the crash was scarce, and when the servers would be brought back online was mostly a matter of rumor. ITS sent voicemail messages to the RTAs, Resident Techonology Assistants, and some faculty; many students weren’t aware of what was happening. When asked if he felt that there had been any communication problems within ITS, Mr. Speyer answered, “No. We have a disaster recovery plan that is clearly defined and we implemented that plan.” As of the time of the crash, the plan for communication was for Residential Technology Assistants and Faculty to let the student body know.
One future solution to the problem of communication is Blackboard. Blackboard is an internet service that allows teachers to post information, homework assignments, and documents. Next year Choate will be incorporating student information into Blackboard, making it the central point of all information at Choate. If the server were to go down, the community could be alerted through blackboard rapidly.
The server technology for FirstClass is quite old. It has been employed for 10 years, and, will no longer be necessary next year when Choate changes from the FirstClass email client to the Outlook email client. Could this happen again next year? Mr Speyer says, “A server crash can happen any time to any server. There are never any guarantees. However, the Exchange server is newer and in the first year of its life cycle. The FirstClass server was at the end of its life cycle. It should be noted that in the ten plus years that Choate has used FirstClass, it has only gone down twice for a major problem. That is an outstanding record of service.
Communication with the rest of campus was poor. Koichi Masuda 07’, an RTA, commented, “The ITS department is effective, but there is room for improvement. The community interaction with ITS has been very low. Their has been no formal explanation as to why the firewall is in place.” The RTAs were left multiple voicemails during the day, and were expected to inform the rest of the students. However, Mr. Speyer states, “There role is not to be a conduit but a resource on dorms to help boarders get their computers connected.”
By all regards the ITS department did an excellent job bringing the server back online; it took less than 24 hours, and no data was lost. Mr. Speyer commented that, “We could have brought up a new server sooner, but it would have been with a whole day of email missing. We thought that this solution was unacceptable and decided to restore the server completely, which took time.”
Choate’s ITS department was founded in the early 1980’s. Since 1992 Mr. Backon has been the head of the department. The campus was wired in 1996. The ITS department has sought the assistance of outside companies for many of its projects, but all technology support on campus has always been handheld by Choate employees. All of Choate’s servers are backed up nightly, and employ RAID 5 technology, to protect and backup the servers in case of a crash.
