Server Crash Slows College for Seven Hours

Harvard returned to a pre-e-mail age yesterday when the Faculty of Arts and Sciences servers malfunctioned.

Users of IMAP e-mail programs such as Eudora, Outlook, and Thunderbird notified FAS Computing Services of access problems as early as 9:30 a.m., and all FAS servers crashed around 10:45 a.m. for nearly seven hours, according to Supervisor of Residential Computing Erin Nettifee.

Students could not visit any FAS Web sites and were able to access their FAS e-mail only intermittently throughout the day until the system was fully restored by 6:30 p.m.

The Computer Services staff and system platform vendor located the problem to be a malfunction in the FAS UNIX storage system.

“Unfortunately, we do not yet have a specific answer as to why the malfunction occurred,” Nettifee said. “The system vendor and operational staff are still on-site investigating the issue.”

E-mails that were sent during the interruption to FAS accounts were delivered by the end of the day, since they remained queued for delivery, according to Nettifee.

With pending correspondence and assignments, students said the amount of time they had to wait for FAS servers to work again was disruptive.

“It’s just inconvenient. I mean, today I had a design document due, and I couldn’t even get my assignment,” said Alice Chi ’09. “I had to ask my TF to find a hackish way to send it, a non-conventional way.

I have it, but now I am also missing all these notes.”

Adenike A. Adewuyi ’09 said she was not able to complete her problem set for Computer Science 50, “Introduction to Computer Science I,” which required her to log on to the FAS server.

“Personally, I hate computers...they have a lot of problems,” she said. “I don’t trust technology.”

Adewuyi did try to see the glass half full, in the end, though.

“The only good thing that came out of it was that the homework was extended,” she said.

Despite the difficulties encountered yesterday, many students are still satisfied with Harvard’s FAS server system. “It works mighty fine,” said Toomas Laarits ’10.

Nettifee offered reassurance to students concerned about possible future technology problems.

“We are constantly working to improve the services that we offer,” Nettifee said.

—Anton S. Troianovski contributed to the reporting of this story.