Penn voicemail server goes down

Penn voicemail server goes down The University's voicemail server was down from 3:15 p.m. Wednesday to 4:10 a.m. yesterday. Assistant Director of Telecommunication Ray Becker said the lapse was due to a hardware failure. "It was a circuit card in the equipment itself that failed," Becker said. "Two years ago I think we had the same issue, but it's a rare occurrence." No messages were lost, and Becker said he received no complaints. "As soon as we detect a problem, we throw an emergency transfer key and it pushes all the calls to the voice mailbox to an offline mailbox, and tells folks that we're having trouble with the system and we're working on it, [and] it will be restored just as soon as we can get [it] back up," Becker said.ÿ"That minimizes the impact -- at least the caller knows that there's something wrong." The problem came to light when a member of Becker's staff had difficulty accessing the system. "It took us not more than a half hour [to determine the cause]," Becker said. He added that the delay between recognizing and resolving the problem was the time it took for Penn's vendor to locate and install the necessary component. "[The lag] was notifying the vendor that has a maintenance agreement on it, and getting it dispatched -- assess the problem, get the part and put it in." -- Bret Hays