Power Outage I

Siena lost power last night around 11 pm for about 3 hourg. And withovt power, there's no computing. We have a Universal Power Source (basically a big battery), but that only lasts a half hour, and with the air conditioning out , the servers overheat before that. Result: everything crashes.

I'm posting this via cell phone (no Internet, no e-mail on campus).

It will take most of the day to restore all services. Restarting 30-40 servers is no trivial task: it has to be done in the right order. Some servers will hang up if other servers aren't running first. And it's worse if they hadn't been shutdown carefully. "Pulling the plug" on all at once creates extra problems.

We're shooting to have everything running by mid-Afternoon. In the meantime, the call center will be swamped with calls, especially since there's no good way in place to tell people the situation.

Should be an interesting day. :(