Email Offline At the Home of Sendmail

BobJacobsen writes "The UC Berkeley email system has been either offline, or only providing limited access, for more than a week. How can the place where sendmail originated fall so far? The campus CIO gave an internal seminar (video, slides) where he discussed the incident, the response, and some of the history. Briefly, the growth of email clients was going to overwhelm the system eventually, but the crisis was advanced when a disk failure required a restart after some time offline. Not discussed is the long series of failures to identify and implement the replacement system (1, 2, 3, 4). Like the New York City Dept. of Education problem discussed yesterday, this is a failure of planning and management being discussed as a problem with (inflexible) technology. How can IT people solve things like this?"

Comments

Re:It isn't an I.T. problem

[StikyPad]

Pretty sure that's what tuition is.

Re:Telnet

[slimjim8094]

Students need school email addresses because that way all students have an email address.

At my school, students are expected to check their university email at least once every 24 hours. Many people forward it to a personal account, and obviously most people check it more frequently than that, but if the university issues an account to everyone, then there can be no debate about how they didn't get the email. The school takes responsibility for the email system (and any failures), and then professors can be assured that if they send an email out to the class, it will be (or should have been) read, leaving the onus on the student to actually do it. It's similar to why we provide computer labs - that way, each student unequivocally has a way to do electronic assignments, even if nearly everyone has their own machine.

No.

[damn_registrars]

Now I have an email addresses through hotmail, gmail and yahoo that I use for different things and facebook also gives me an email address. So, I doubt students really need email addresses provided by the university anymore.

You are quite wrong. Email addresses - especially .edu addresses - are still quite valuable. At lot of academic resources that take registration via email won't allow registration to go to a throwaway account (a la hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc). Many organizations that are interested in real information on users insist that users use an actual unique account and not a freebie. And when you're in college and making very little money a lot of those things can be important.

I think it just shows that trying to build IT competence into a government agency basically a waste of money because the institutional culture of government

You're not very accurate on that, either. Government organizations need to be able to keep track of their email - especially internal communications - which they would not be able to do if they outsourced email and other telecom.

In short, all of these kinds of organizations could just offer email through gmail/google business or any number of other providers that will scale up almost infinitely.

With the various privacy breeches that have occurred, that would be a terrible idea. And on top of that, IT is a lot more than just email. Do you want the government to turn to comcast for networking support while their at it? What if the IRS web servers go down on tax day? Do you want them to have to lean on an outside company to get it back up?