Temporary E-mail Shut-Down Planned

This Friday evening, Harvard students will not be able to substitute e-mail for a social life—there won’t be any e-mail at all.

The Harvard Arts and Sciences Computing Services (HASCS) Unix servers will be shut down Friday for more than six hours as technicians improve the storage infrastructure of the main network file system (NFS), system administrators announced last week.

Access to the Instructional Computing Environment will be shut down beginning at 5 p.m., according to HASCS. Access to general login servers, e-mail, web and other Unix services will be shut down at 6 p.m. All the network should be back up by around midnight.

“We debated a few possible time slots for this major outage before settling on this one,” said Coordinator of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98, who is also a Crimson editor, in a written statement.

Davis explained that HASCS chose this Friday because it was the beginning of a three-day weekend, early in the term and was “the most ideal” date until spring break next month to update equipment.

The staff decided to complete the work in the evening—and not overnight as it typically does for smaller projects—since the entire staff assigned to the Unix server will have to be present for the upgrade. Davis explained that if the work were done overnight, nobody would be available the next day to troubleshoot the server.

“It’s going to be an inconvenience for some, but we hope that number is as minimized as possible,” Davis said in an interview yesterday. “This is a chance for people to take a night off and go to dinner or to a show.”

The outage will allow HASCS staff to replace two of the old slow servers in the Science Center, freeing up more space. Since the servers contain only administrative data that are necessary to support system operations, no user data or e-mail will be moved or touched.

“Essentially, we’re moving the responsibilities of that one administrative NFS server—which is large and takes up too much power—to other servers,” Davis said.

Additionally, the new servers will provide more electrical power to the system, which handles three-quarters of a million e-mail messages per day, according to Davis.

Finally, the upgrade will provide space for a new tape backup machine. Currently, the system backs-up each user’s files for up to six days—a massive task considering that each individual on the network is allotted 50 megabytes of space and can request up to 100 megabytes. The new machine will take up less space and will record files for a larger period of time.

“The performance [of the Unix servers] after this upgrade should be at least as good, maybe even a little bit faster,” Davis said.

—Staff writer Jeslyn A. Miller can be reached at jmiller@fas.harvard.edu.