Dear Choate Rosemary Hall Community,

Due to circumstances that were beyond our control, THE NEWS was unable to go to print with a normal issue this week. With the First Class server’s being down all Tuesday, the production of our issue was not possible. THE NEWS would like to apologize to all those who contributed to the issue that was slated to come out today. THE NEWS would also like to apologize to the Choate community for not having an issue out this week, as well as assure that some of the topics featured in the April 14th issue will be printed in the April 21st issue in conjunction with those topics originally slated to go to print that week. Be sure to read the April 21st issue for coverage of all of the recent events of the past few weeks.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Corey Sherman, Editor-in-Chief, for The News Masthead

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Dear Students, Faculty, and Staff.

On Tuesday, April 11th, at 12:15am the FirstClass server had a hardware failure that caused the machine to stop functioning. Servers are large computers that often have multiple hard drives in order to insure a constant backup. The configuration of the FirstClass server is a RAID-5 (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) which can handle one hard drive failing without any lose of data. This is done through a a process called mirroring where one drive is always copied to another drive.

A piece of hardware called the RAID controller, the device that controls the disks, failed and caused the server to freeze. Attempts throughout the morning of April 11th to bring the server back up failed as the computer froze after limited use. It became apparent by noon that ITS would need to build another server and transfer all of the FirstClass mailboxes from the failing server to the backup server. The reason for the long delay was in the transfer process. The failing server had to be brought up, mailboxes copied, and then the machine server would freeze. This process was repeated for over 12 hours as ITS wanted to insure that every mailbox was recovered and no data was lost.

Mr. Berretta and Mr. Hulley stayed at school and worked in shifts through the early morning hours of Wednesday, April 12th, building, testing, and restoring data. At 6:00am on April 12th a new FirstClass server was back on line. I would like to publicly thank both of these gentlemen for their dedication and efforts.

Inbound email to FirstClass users was not lost during the 18 hours that the server was down. Email goes to a Linux server first and was held in a queue until the FirstClass server came back on line.

We apologize for the long outage. Email has become a necessity in our lives. We understand how difficult it was to "be in the dark" for a full day. However, computers have moving parts and they do break down from time to time. ITS prepares for these types of disasters by having spare parts on hand and/or server maintenance agreements that allow us to get new parts within 24 hours.

If you have any specific questions about this incident, please feel to contact me directly. I will be in the Annex this Friday from 11am until 12:30pm if you wish to speak to me directly.