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Repercussions of the recent power cut

The power cut in St Andrews at 5pm on Friday 3 September caused serious disruption to IT Services. It couldn't have occurred at a worse time since there is no IT staff cover over the weekend. Fortunately, most of our computer systems restarted automatically once the the power was restored two hours later. One important exception was the SARA dialup service which remained unavailable until Monday morning when manual intervention was needed to restart it.

The most serious effect was the damage caused to two of our key computers. One controls the backup dumps of files on the Sun disks; the other (named hons) was used to maintain databases of essential information including details of our users' Sun accounts and the IP addresses of all computers connected to the University network. Our systems staff were able to fix the problems with the first computer when they returned to work on Monday. However, a reliable repair could not be done on hons which was ancient in computer terms, having been in continuous service since 1990.

We had planned to replace hons during the summer by a new computer (named katheter) but this schedule had slipped due to other demands on staff time. The decision on timing of the move was now out of our hands and we had to proceed immediately with the replacement. This involved converting the suite of software programs used on hons so that they would work on katheter, a major difference being that hons ran under the old Solaris 1 operating system while katheter uses Solaris 2. For technical reasons related to improved security we also had to make several design changes to the programs used.

We are pleased to say that we were able to complete the work within eight working days, relying on staff working at night and at weekends to achieve this. During this period, the databases were frozen in the state they were in at the time of the power cut. The most serious effect of this was that new members of staff were not able to get Sun accounts immediately upon arrival in St Andrews. We were able to recommence updates of the databases on 15 September just in time to be able to create over 1400 Sun accounts for new students who were matriculating the next day.

At the time of writing (23 September) the backlog of unprocessed requests for new accounts and changes to existing accounts has almost been cleared. Our apologies to all users who have been inconvenienced.