Monitor System "uni-wide" outages
This page provides a record of recent Monitor System outages which are likely to have impacted the availability to Students and Staff of ALL monitored photocopiers and printers in the University.
Date: Tuesday 1st September 2009
Duration of system outage: from approximately 8:50am to approximately 6:15pm
Effect:
Initially the system was apparently available and appeared to be functioning normally. Later, transient problems which were reported by various users appeared to be rectified by a hard reset of the controlling servers.
However, the system began to fail increasingly often and become more and more unstable until from from approximately 9:20am continued usage of monitored devices became impossible.
Cause:
The root cause of the problem was ultimately diagnosed as a failure in a critical hardware component of one of the two servers upon which the Monitor system is run.
A replacement for the failed hardware component was eventually acquired and the failed server was re-built. Following the re-build, the hardware was tested to ensure resilience. The system data at the point of error was checked for consistency. Fortunately, a full data restore was not necessary. The Monitor system was released back into production at around 6:05 pm at which point monitored copiers and printers through the university returned to normal operation.
The total downtime during which the system and all attached monitored copiers and printers were completely unavailable was approximately 9 hours.