SAS Webmail has first fall crash

The School of Arts and Sciences' Webmail has experienced its first technical hiccup of the semester, though New Student Orientation festivities may have caused students to overlook the glitch.

SAS Webmail regularly runs updates from its software company, Sun Microsystems Inc., and a faulty update led a shutdown earlier this week.

Students were unable to access their SAS Webmail accounts Sept. 1 between 1 and 9:30 a.m.

Ira Winston, the School's chief of information technology, said that faulty updates have infrequently caused shutdowns in the past, but he could not recall any specific incidents.

Winston said that technicians arrived by 2:30 a.m. to address the issue, but that it takes seven hours for the system to restart.

"It takes a long time to reboot," he said. "Each message had to be scanned for errors when the system is started."

Computing and Educational Technology Services is planning changes to Webmail that would reduce the restart delay from seven hours to one hour, Winston said.

Students who receive messages through a third party account like Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail continued to receive messages during last week's shutdown because the forwarding process is done by a separate computer system, Winston said.

But he added that few students were likely impacted during this shutdown because most students don't use school accounts in the early hours.

Many were not even aware of the problem.

"I did not know" the system went down, Nick Barone, a College freshman in Hill College House, said.

His roommate Bill Liu, an ITA and also a College freshman, was unaware as well.

However, Engineering sophomore Conor Donnelly said that he would be uncomfortable if problems arose after the start of classes.

Phone technicians at Penn's Information Systems and Computing helpline, First Call, did not notice an increase in help calls.

ISC operator Shiela Bayes said that such a shutdown is normally accompanied by an increase in calls.

SAS Webmail last experienced shutdowns in late March of this year.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.