Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
Many students were frustrated to find themselves unable to access their email over the web this past weekend.
According to Robin Jacobson, Associated Director of Client Services at ITS, the servers were encountering difficulties because their log files were full. While a script cleared out some of the problem over the course of the weekend, this only permitted intermittent access.
ITS didn’t realize the full extent of the problem until late Sunday morning, when Senior Systems Administrator Patrick Treptau was alerted and was unable to remotely fix the problem. As ITS has no staff at Swarthmore during the weekends, Terptau had to drive to campus in order to fix the error which slowed resolution of the issue.
As of this afternoon, Jacobson was unclear why the logs had filled, but ITS is looking into the issue in order to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
