Students left mail-less

Just over two days ago, Boston College's students were reintroduced to an earlier era when BC's e-mail service unexpectedly crashed and left thousands without access to their Webmail accounts. Today, access to Webmail remains limited, with administrators and technicians scrambling to fix an error that has left the e-mail system operational, yet inaccessible.

In fact, this week has witnessed a battery of crashes and failures for BC's Information Technology Services, including an incident Tuesday morning that temporarily crashed the entire network. The problem with Webmail stems from a communication error among different servers that host the site, preventing users from logging on to the server to access their stored e-mails.

The exact nature of the problem, however, has left technicians scratching their heads. As the features of e-mail systems such as Webmail increase, so does the complexity of sustaining and supporting such a system. Because of increasing complications, BC has been forced to use a multitude of different software and hardware vendors, including IBM and Oracle. But, as Mary Corcoran, the associate vice president of user and support services and Information Technology Services, pointed out, the more vendors there are, the more the potential there is for problems such as the one that has crippled the system this week to occur.

"The e-mail environment has become increasingly more complicated to solve the problem, especially with all of the different vendors we have to deal with. Right now we are working with the vendors to do exactly what they tell us, and it's helping to diagnose problems by ruling certain things out," Corcoran said. "In the old days, we could more easily control [problems], but because it has become so complicated, it is hard to control now."

Corcoran explained that ITS is attacking the problem in layers, examining the system piece by piece to determine the exact source of the problem. "There is a group of technicians actively working around the clock. We have a conference room that is being used as a headquarters for our team, which is working together to fix this," Corcoran said.

Because of the complexity of the problem, ITS officials do not have a timeline for when WebMail will be fully functional. Corcoran hopes to have the system running normally within the day.

"This is a very rare occasion for us. We will learn from this as we learn from any other event," Corcoran said.

In the meantime, Corcoran recommended that students forward their WebMail to an external service such as Gmail or Hotmail, explaining that WebMail is still receiving and storing e-mails normally. Students will still be able to access and log on to WebMail during non-peak hours, but during peak hours, the system becomes overloaded and users will not be able to log in. Corcoran also explained that Outlook users may have trouble accessing WebMail and recommended those students use WebMail directly. Additionally, there will be regular updates about the condition of WebMail on www.bc.edu/info.