Hardware Problems Lead to Outages

[Geoff Sauer]

Hi everyone,

We've now leaving a weekend which has been fraught with problems for the EServer staff. One of our three workstations (the oldest) began behaving erratically on Friday, crashing and (despite tools we have specifically to prevent this) not restarting again automatically. This led to outages on Friday morning, throughout Saturday afternoon, and early morning Sunday.

After a day spent on Sunday trying to identify the cause of the problems (failing hard drive? no. errors with installed RAM? no. problems with the workstation motherboard? no. problems with the operating system? no.). In the end, from 4-6pm today, we reinstalled a number of software packages, including several which underlie the EServer TC Library.

And now the system seems to be running much better—exactly as it's supposed to. So we'll hope the problems have now been resolved. (knocking wood). We apologize for the outages, and will now redouble our efforts to raise funds to upgrade our 2004 workstation to a modern system. See http://about.eserver.org/WishList for details.