The BlitzMail server Comet collapsed Thursday afternoon, leaving many students without access to BlitzMail for approximately 40 minutes, according to Director for Technical Services David Bucciero.
When students attempted to sign into BlitzMail, they received an error message stating that the computer could not connect to the mail server due to either a network problem or a server that was down.
"It was really annoying because it was only [BlitzMail]," Vanessa Szalapski '10 said. "At first I thought it was my computer, but I tried three other computers and my name still didn't work."
The server's collapse was especially distressing to those women, such as Kaili Lambe '09, who were involved in rush this week and anxiously awaiting BlitzMail messages informing them of which houses had invited them to return.
The server collapsed at 3:20 p.m. and was restored by 4 p.m., Bucciero said.
"Comet, [one of many such Blitz servers], experienced a brief outage [Thursday] afternoon due to a configuration setting that was incorrect. A triggering of this incorrect setting caused the behavior exhibited [Thursday] afternoon. The incorrect configuration setting is now fixed," Director of Systems Services John Gaythorpe said.
Problems with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol may have prevented many other students from signing on to BlitzMail. Dartmouth has utilized LDAP, a directory service that allows the Dartmouth Name Directory to access information, for several years.
This crash is not the first incident Dartmouth has had with the software. Previous difficulties, coupled with Thursday afternoon's system failure, prompted the school to implement plans to switch the LDAP service Thursday night.
"We're moving away from Sun's LDAP," Bucciero said. "We're moving to Red Hat's LDAP, and we believe the problems we're experiencing [are] resolved in this new software."
Although the LDAP problem is separate from that of the failed server, Bucciero hopes that switching from Sun's software to Red Hat's will prevent future frustration.
