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Computer servers to be offline for several hours today and Saturday
The Advocate
Mt. Hood Community College will experience a rolling wave of planned computer outages today and Saturday as crews clean servers contaminated during summer construction.
The outages actually began Thursday and have been planned to inconvenience as few staff and students as possible, said Michael Hay, the vice president of information technology and chief information officer.
Beginning at 5:30 p.m. Friday there will be no service for Distance Learning and Web CT, because of plans to protect the sensitive electrical and related equipment used to provide data to the college, Hay said.
He said there was significant damage to hardware and facility infrastructure.
Infrastructure Technology Services Manager Michael Callaghan wrote in an e-mail, “We have coordinated this outage with the Distance Learning department and this was determined to be the time of day that online classes are least accessed by students and staff.”
Renovations to prepare new classrooms 1511 and 1519 called for construction changes in the server room next door, which sustained damage due to the wallboard dust, debris, dirt and contaminants coming into the room.
The library will also be without service Friday evening, and, according to Callaghan, computer services will coordinate with the library technical service group to make sure the server is up and fully functional for Saturday morning business. Callaghan said, “The web address www.mhcc.edu and all information accessed from this webpage will be unavailable on Friday night.”
Hay said, “We would like to say that this was preventable. However, the tactics utilized and the protections employed did not work as advertised.” Staff members are working on resolving the problem and reducing the risk of that situation.
Network Specialist Marvin Peters said, “We had our office where Room 1519 is now. At the end of May we moved out of there to a temporary location behind the bookstore and they remodeled the room. Between the classroom and the server room, there was a wall with windows and some double doors from the office into the server room and they removed all that, framed and sheetrocked it.”
Hay said, “We consider this an emergency that requires fixing deliberately, methodically and in-depth. It is not necessary to stop everything right now, at this given moment. However, time is of the essence to ensure services continue with minimal interruption.”
A specialized California company, Data Clean, was cleaning computer systems and databases last Sunday. They cleaned exterior hardware, the tops of floors, entrances and exits, windows, under-floors and replaced the filters on the cooling systems.
The next stage started Thursday night with equipment cleaning to remove inhaled particles.
“We shut down a few servers at a time to clean them,” said Peters. “The critical servers, like the MHCC portal, was down once for about an hour.”
In an e-mail sent Wednesday Callaghan wrote, “Thursday, October 1st, beginning at 7:30 p.m.: This will be an evening of rolling outages as we turn off and clean each file server and computer.”
According to the e-mail, the wireless management server will be cleaned, which should take 45-90 minutes.
Callaghan wrote, “During this time no one will be able to connect to the wireless network at any campus.
On Friday, there will be limited service to the e-mail for all college users from 5:30 p.m. to 11 p.m.. Callaghan said, “We expect this outage to be for three hours from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.”
MyMHCC and Portal activities will also be limited because they will be cleaning two of four servers, so slower response times are expected.
On Saturday, there will be no access to the S:, M: or G: drives on the college network, according to Callaghan. He said, “The file servers for those network drives will be cleaned on Saturday and all Novell drives will be unavailable Saturday between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.”
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