As the rooster crowed Friday morning, juniors across campus awoke to register online for their senior fall courses. While the 7 a.m. wake-up call was accepted as a necessary evil for those seeking to get a headstart on their peers, these brave souls soon realized that their efforts were, in fact, for naught. Registration hub ACES was down, juniors became annoyed and course registration would have to wait at least another day.
The ACES debacle capped off a hellish week for the Office of Information Technology, as unrelated system problems caused major e-mail outages across the University, on and off, from Tuesday to Friday. Both issues have apparently been resolved, but not before causing their share of headaches for students, other e-mail users and OIT personnel.
OIT Director of Customer Support and spokesperson Ginny Cake said the ACES problem came about because the amount of memory used by "pooled database connections" exceeded the total amount of available system memory, causing a server overload. Although Cake did not say whether the problem was avoidable, she said the issue will be rectified for future registration sessions after OIT takes steps to reduce the amount of memory taken up by the pooled database connections.
About 90 minutes after it was clear ACES was not functioning, Registrar Bruce Cunningham e-mailed all juniors, apologizing for the technical difficulties and telling them he hoped to open the senior registration window at 9 a.m. Saturday, provided that OIT was ready.
Then, several hours later, he e-mailed juniors again to tell them registration would actually begin at 7 a.m. Monday, pushing back all other classes' registration one day. His rationale was that several students e-mailed him to tell him about practice LSAT and MCAT administrations, athletic travel and other travel.
"The fact that we decided to move the window to Monday instead of Saturday was a direct result of the feedback provided to us by students," Cunningham said, noting the general helpfulness of the student feedback he received.
Many juniors expressed mild annoyance at having to wake up early twice to register but were relatively sanguine about the move to Monday instead of Saturday.
"I'm definitely glad they moved it to Monday because I was out of town this weekend, and I know a lot of other people who were too," said junior Mac Conforti. A number of students not affiliated with a sports team visited Atlanta this weekend to watch the men's basketball team advance to the Final Four.
OIT's other problem this week--persistent e-mail difficulties--lacked a silver lining. At 6:20 p.m. March 23, Senior Technical Architect and Strategist Michael Gettes said an operating system malfunction caused the e-mail server to crash, and a critical file system containing user identification information was corrupted. Despite a brief return to service about an hour later, e-mail promptly became inaccessible again and was not restored until 4:30 a.m. the next day.
All seemed well until Thursday, when another file system exhibited many of the same symptoms that the previous file system did just before it became corrupted. To head off the problem, OIT notified about 7,000 users that their e-mail access would be shut down for six to eight hours, beginning at 5 p.m. The shutdown actually lasted 10.5 hours, but by the morning all e-mail was back online.
Many students said they were quite irritated by the e-mail shutdown, which caused some messages to be delayed by as long as three days.
"Honestly, I didn't care much about it until I woke up the next morning and found out that I had stayed up until 3 a.m. studying for a class that was canceled," senior Anna Mims said. "I just think it's absurd that we pay all this money and then Duke can't keep e-mail up and running in the middle of the week."
Cake said there may be more unplanned e-mail outages, and that there will likely be at least one more planned outage. "Until the root cause is known, we cannot guarantee that it will not happen again. We are doing everything we can to prevent another unscheduled outage," she said. "Once the root cause is known and we have solutions, we will probably need to take the system down to implement the solutions."
Duke is already in the process of transferring all users to a central e-mail system, a process that was supposed to be completed by the end of February but that has been stymied several times and has plateaued at about 65 percent completion. An ironic sidenote is that OIT personnel worked for months to avoid a general e-mail shutdown.
"Georgetown University recently had an e-mail system switch during which their entire e-mail system was down for a few days," said Gettes in February. "That would have been unacceptable at Duke."
Currently, OIT personnel are working with Sun Microsystems, the manufacturer of the Solaris operating system that had the problems. Cake said the Duke case is urgent enough that it has been referred to that company's CEO.
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