Server crash prompts officials to change web registration times
ANDREW SOUKUP
News Writer
The server that handles most of the University's primary administrative tasks overheated and crashed Wednesday morning, causing officials in the Registrar's office to reschedule the Web registration times for hundreds of juniors, graduate students and law students.
In what one member of the registrar's office called the worst registration-related situation that had occurred in over two decades, Registrar Harold Pace announced Wednesday that registration times would be changed while the Office of Information Technologies attempted to replace damaged components of the overheated server.
Students scheduled to register on Wednesday will register Friday, while those scheduled to register today had their registration times moved to Saturday. No time slots had been altered, said Pace, thus preserving the original order assigned by the registrar's office.
Over 2,500 students were affected by the change, including graduate students and business graduate students, law students, undergraduate juniors and Saint Mary's students trying to take classes at Notre Dame.
Barring any further problems, Pace did not expect the rescheduling to affect sophomores and freshman registration dates. Sophomores are scheduled to being registering through Irishlink Monday.
Most students have the same class schedule on Friday as they do on Wednesday, Pace said, and moving the registration days to Friday and Saturday would minimize the number of students that would have to skip class to register.
"This is not a situation of our choosing," said Pace, whose office was flooded with hundreds of phone calls. "We just hope that students can work with us through this emergency."
The overheated server operated what OIT Chief Technology Officer Dewitt Latimer called "core administrative tasks," including payroll, security dispatches and student services – the database that Irishlink uses in Web registration. None of the data was lost and Latimer likened the shutdown to a computer that is intact but would not turn on.
"There's no data loss," he said, "but no computer to bring it up."
Pace said this is the first time registration dates actually had to be moved. When a problem occurred in the past, registrar officials could help students register for courses in the office. But without access to the computer system, registrar officials will not have even that option available.
Pace said the telephone registration system, commonly called DART and previously used by the registrar's office before a switch to Web registration in the fall 2001 semester, is no longer operational.
The problem that caused the server to overheat originally occurred last week, Latimer said, and is the third problem that occurred in a week. Following a long string of relatively few problems, the 5-year-old server overheated and shut down last week. The OIT thought they fixed the problem but this past weekend another server component overheated and again caused a shutdown.
After the OIT replaced the second component, Pace said his office noticed a slower response time and sent out an e-mail to some students telling them that if they had problems, they should go to the Registrar's office in the Main Building for assistance.
Latimer estimated that the server failed again around 7:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, a half-hour before the first group of students was scheduled to register.
As wave after wave of concerned students arrived at the registrar's office, Pace and the OIT staff established a 9 a.m. deadline to fix the problem before they decided to move the times. When it became clear that computer components would have to be replaced again, Pace told approximately 60 students outside the registrar's office of the move and sent out an e-mail about a half-hour later.
Latimer said the OIT had no idea that the server, which was scheduled to be replaced in three years, was about to overheat. A special technician was working Wednesday to replace most of the components in the server.
"That's the characteristic of heat-related failure," Latimer said. "They show no symptoms until it fails. We thought we had a functional system."
Both Pace and Latimer said they expected the server to be operational by Friday, but did not say what would happen if the server was not operational by then.
Latimer said the OIT had a secondary server that would take at least eight hours to hook up and OIT officials were trying to decide whether to begin setting up the backup server.
"Hindsight is 20-20 and had we known what we know now, we would have done it," he said. "But at this point, we're going to wait."
All News Stories for Thursday, April 10, 2003
