This beginning of term has been rather interesting as there have been many technical glitches at UVic, with some of them affecting my workplace. We'll start with the fine arts' computer servers. Apparently they got hacked really badly last week some time, so they had to reset everyone's passwords. What's annoying is that you have to go to them in person to get your password reset. Some people work off campus (ie Vancouver), so it's not easy at all to get your account up and running again.
Last Sunday, the engineering and computer science networks went down, so no one could connect to the servers. This was rather annoying as some of us have to connect to those servers to do assignments and such. My work's web application lives on that network as well, so no one could access the application.
Moving on to Monday, at around 8pm, all of the engineering buildings got hit with a power outage. By default, all the computers and servers went dead. Again,
some of us who need to do assignments on those machines were interrupted.
Unfortunately, the server that our web application lives on went down as well because of the blackout. It came back up Tuesday morning; however, the clock on the server was wrong, so we had a few glitches because of that.
During lunch time on Tuesday, UVic's netlink went down. Netlink is the authentication system used at UVic; it is used to log into various things such as the library networks, e-mail, etc. Our web application uses Netlink authentication to verify that UVic students are using our website. With Netlink down, both staff and students were unable to use our web application. Online library service was down, dial-up connections were down, and a few other main services were down throughout campus. What's even worse is that new students were unable to create their Netlink accounts.
A few months ago, my co-worker Myron wrote an add-on for our web application which utilized an alternate authentication system that was supposed to replace Netlink authentication. The system is called LDAP, and it's an authentication system just like Netlink. UVic runs an LDAP server which runs parallel to Netlink. Anyways, this add-on that Myron wrote was experimental, and it hadn't been fully tested yet. However, this add-on would allow our application to come back up because we'd be switching from Netlink to LDAP.
My boss was somewhat annoyed that people kept thinking our web application kept going down because of something we did, when clearly it was beyond our control. With the application down, we had a lot of staff on campus that were idle. Since we had nothing to lose, my boss gave the green light to activate this experimental LDAP code. Our system administrator recompiled PHP, and we launched the new code. Magically, students and staff were able to use our system again. We were happy that our system was up while the other systems on campus were crippled. (Normally we don't take changes with releasing experimental code that could affect over 1,500 users.)
Later that afternoon, Netlink came back up, but there was another problem. Portions of the internet were down. Big websites like Google, Hotmail, etc were inaccesible. This wasn't a campus problem, this was a global problem. When it rains, it pours eh?
Finally we arrive to today's computer problem. So back in February,
I told you all about our new eMacs we got in the office. Well, this morning, I turned my Mac on, and I noticed that the top of the screen was jittering. At times, the screen would flicker on and off very quickly. Something was up, so I rebooted my computer, hoping it was a temporary problem. The computer booted up, but now my screen wouldn't turn on, it was completely dead. I had to call the new help desk guy to troubleshoot my problems. He couldn't figure it out, so we have to bring the computer into the campus computer store for servicing; luckily, the computer is under warrenty. If they can't fix it on campus, then they'll have to ship it back to Apple which would take quite some time. I'm somewhat shocked that my computer has had problems so soon. I've only had it for 7 months.
One thing that I really don't like about Macs is that their computers are completely integrated with their computer monitors. If the monitor fails, you have to send the entire computer back for repairs. Not very modular design. On the contrary, if my PC's monitor went dead, I could send back just the screen, and keep my computer. I could in the meantime, use another monitor with my computer. This is not the case for a Mac.
Computer downtime means a lot of lost productivity and money. Oh well, it's just one of those weeks.
