E-mail outage from hardware failure

By The Santa Clara

Last weekend's loss of GroupWise Web access through its normally visited link was caused by the failure of a machine designed to manage server activity, an Information Technology representative said Wednesday.

IT Director Carl Fussell said the "unacceptable" unavailability was caused by the breakdown of a "load balancer," a machine that, among other things, regulates connections from computers accessing GroupWise.

Although IT personnel worked through the weekend to provide temporary fixes, an express-shipped replacement part could not be delivered until Tuesday, when service was fully restored.

If problems to the Web mail service arise in the future, Fussell recommended that students download the GroupWise client, available from http://it.scu.edu.

Fussell also encouraged students to check the IT Web site for updates during technological breakdowns.

IT has faced past problems with GroupWise, most noticeably last summer, when a third-party vendor erased weeks' worth of mailbox and calendar data.