Outage causes e-mail failure
Officials say lost e-mails should be delivered soon
By Sarah Chacko
Staff Reporter

An electrical power outage Friday morning left faculty and staff up the information highway without a paddle.

Technical Services Manager Bill Senter said voltage feeding the computer room where the server is set up dropped to a point where the uninterruptible power source (UPS) could not power the room a little after midnight.

The UPS should have switched to a battery power while a generator starts up to take over the load, Senter said. However, the UPS failed to switch to the battery backup and power to the computer room was lost abruptly, Senter said. The generator restored power a few minutes later with no recognizable damage or loss, he said.

At about 9 a.m., power was lost again, Senter said. When power was restored, the e-mail system holding the faculty and staff server would not load due to a file corruption, he said.

“When the system is brought down, you want it to be done gently and orderly, or they crash,” Senter said.

Attempts were made to repair the server, but could not be completed successfully, Senter said. The first power failure corrupted backup from that day, so backup had to be restored from the Thursday’s tapes, Senter said.

While students only lost e-mails from about 9 to 10:30 a.m. Friday, the faculty/staff server lost e-mails received from 1 a.m. Thursday to Friday morning, Senter said. The faculty/staff server was kept down until Sunday afternoon, but the mail sent during that time should eventually be redelivered, Senter said.

George Bates, manager of electrical maintenance, said the power outage occurred after a circuit breaker tripped. The breaker is calculated to give maximum protection but can then only be set at the minimum required to ensure reliability, which means it can trip at the smallest power drop, Bates said. The breaker is currently being investigated to recalculate its protection and reliability balance, he said.

Senter said new hardware is being implemented to backup the system on disk. Disks allow much faster recovery and will minimize time lost, he said. The UPS switch that failed to turn on the battery backup has also been replaced, Senter said.

Many faculty said it was fortunate that the incident occurred during Spring Break, and that the situation was handled quickly. However, officials said the problem is never really eliminated.

“We don’t anticipate having a problem again like this, but I didn’t anticipate this either,” Bates said.

Travis Cook, director of business services, said in his 25 years of working in technology, this was the first time he lost e-mail and could not recover it. While he could not conduct his normal business and a few things had to be delayed until Monday, the good e-mail does far outweighs potential for failure, Cook said.

“For better or worse, (e-mail) is a fact of life,” Cook said. “If you don’t have e-mail these days, you’re not communicating.”

s.e.chacko@tcu.edu