Disk error disrupts Wharton e-mail

A major disk failure on futures.wharton.upenn.edu, the primary Wharton School of Business undergraduate e-mail computer, denied Wharton students access to their e-mail accounts for three days -- adversely affecting both academic and social spheres of their lives. The disk error also rendered the equity.wharton.-upenn.edu computer used by most Wharton graduate students inoperable. The crash took place at approximately 5 p.m. last Thursday and was not fully restored until Sunday at 1:30 p.m., when all user data was restored from backup. But the aftereffects of the blackout continue to disrupt class assignments, Operations and Information Management projects and some messages. All messages sent to futures.wharton users during the three days could neither be received nor bounced back to the sender. Any student who attempted to send messages to a futures.wharton account received an announcement on their accounts. "Those who sent you e-mail messages on Thursday before 5 p.m. have been notified that they should consider resending," the announcement read. During the shutdown, Wharton students were not informed of the problems or any efforts to fix them. Students in OPIM classes had their latest assignment pushed back three days due to the failure -- but were not informed until yesterday, the day it was scheduled to be turned in. "I stayed up until 4:30 in the morning trying to finish my OPIM work," said Wharton freshman Mark Nodelman. "If I had known that the assignment wasn't due, I wouldn't have had to pull any crazy stunts like that." The computer failure also affected students who are not enrolled in OPIM courses. Wharton freshman Gregory Steinberg said many of his classes rely on e-mail to distribute weekly assignments. For a majority of futures.wharton users, the major inconvenience was the loss of communication with friends. "It drove me insane," said Wharton freshman Lori Werfel. "I lost so many letters from friends, messages about meetings and forwards. I know that many people can't send them again either." But at least one student was not annoyed by the failure. "I was glad that futures didn't work," said Wharton freshman Bradley Coburn. "I don't agree with the whole information age. I didn't have to write back to friends or use money to call anyone. It was great." A message on the answering machine of the Wharton Computing Services Office said, "We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by this disruption."