ITSS News
Storm-related technology problems
4.15.2008
Due to the blizzard on Friday, April 11, some ITSS equipment was damaged and had to be replaced. This equipment manages password updates and authentication processes. It has taken several days to resolve these problems, and we hope they are corrected now. If you experience continuing problems, please report them to the ITSS Help Desk at 218-726-8847 or helpdesk@d.umn.edu.
If you are interested in more details, please read on.
During the storm last week the high winds caused some power outages across campus. Our main server room has emergency generator power, so our systems were able to stay working during most of the outages. However, at some point, one of the outages knocked out the cooling system for our server room. Even though UMD was closed on Friday morning, ITSS staff were on campus responding to these problems. Facilities Management staff assisted by getting the cooling system working again.
Unfortunately, during the cooling system outage, one important system overheated, resulting in a large disk system failure. ITSS staff worked hard on Friday and Saturday to replace the disk system involved, and late on Saturday much of the system was working again. ITSS then worked with staff from the Twin Cities to restart information flow for passwords and access privileges. Data was flowing again on Sunday.
Since the system involved was one that processes authorization and authentication, testing all the different subsystems involved required a lot of staff time. Some data was processed on Sunday (lab related), some data was processed overnight on Monday, and the rest came through Monday night. As far as we can tell we are current with access information.
This was particularly bad timing, since so many of us are currently being asked to change our passwords for security purposes. Password changes made late last week may have been delayed in being distributed to UMD systems.
ITSS labs had some additional access issues on Tuesday which were resolved in the early afternoon. The process for granting lab access is very complex, and some of the supporting data was not in sync with the processing involved. We believe we have this solved at this time.
Our apologies for any issues caused by this problem. We thank you for your patience and understanding.