An ETSU hardware failure Monday night was the cause of many students being unable to register earlier this week.
Mark Bragg, director of client support services, said that the server lost a disk controller, which in layman’s terms, is what allows the computer to talk to the hard drive.
The Office of Information and Technology (OIT) ordered a new part Monday night and received the part early Tuesday morning.
“We got parts delivered in a few hours,” Bragg said.
He said that OIT had to build the disk base from scratch, because all student data and human resource data was lost.
He said that OIT worked diligently all day Tuesday rebuilding the disk and then testing the system thoroughly so that it would be in working order Wednesday morning at 8 a.m.
“We know registration is a critical time for students,” Bragg said.
Bragg said that by 2:30 a.m. Tuesday night, the server was finally up and running in preparation for Wednesday’s registration. “This took a lot of effort on our part,” Bragg said.
Goldlink began failing Monday afternoon as students were trying to register. However, some were able to go to the registrar’s office and have their schedules manually placed into the system.
By Tuesday morning, students were completely unable to register.
The registrar’s office pushed all registration back by one day. Appointments were at the same time as scheduled, but simply one day later.
Bragg said this was made possible by Rick Hardin, who wrote a computer program that allowed administration to move the students’ registration appointments back by one day.
Bragg said measures to prevent this type of failure in the future are already underway.
This hardware failure was a single-point failure, he said. This means that when one piece of equipment fails, the entire system shuts down.
The system will soon feature redundant disk controllers and redundant disk arrays which are fault tolerant, so that this type of system failure will not be able to happen in the future.
He said OIT is making significant investments into this venture and that the system will be state-of-the-art.
Registrar Paul Hayes said that this is the first incident of this kind since students have been able to register by telephone or the Internet.
He said students have been able to register by telephone since 1994 and by Internet since about 1998.
Bragg said that he and OIT are sincerely sorry for the inconveniences that students faced, but that Goldlink is now fully operational.

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