Wednesday 31 October 2007

Less Exciting Times: When Your Server Goes Down

Having just spent three months preparing for the EPrints Call for Plugins (see http://www.eprints.org/software/cfp.php) I find that firstly the JISC mailing list server is having problems and it takes a whole day to get the message sent to the repository mailing list which then makes the delayed delivery of the mail coincide with a hardware fault taking our server down!!! I just don't believe it! After all that prep, just when everyone receives the email, they can't click on any of the links to find more information. ARRRGGGHHH!

More to the topic of this blog, the fault also took our school repository down for the day. This is a wakeup call, because it probably means that the hardware is on its way out. I did explain in a post at the beginning of the summer that it was running on a fairly old machine, that has done OK by us for about 5 years.

We do have a replacement waiting in the wings, because it is the EPrints v3 migration. However, we did imagine that we had a more leisurely timeframe to roll it out in - and to do user training so that people would understand the new interface. Looks like it's going to be a bit more rushed than I thought. I'll demo the new setup to our research committee today (that's a good coincidence!), so hopefully they'll greenlight it with minor changes at most.

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