04/20/09, 14:05PM:
The student email recovery is going well, although a little slower than first expected. The process of moving all student mail to the newly created mailboxes is resource intense. We are actively working with students on an individual basis resolving problems when necessary. An email recovery mailbox has been created for your use if you have a question or problem to report. If your mailbox has not been recovered by 5:00 PM please send an email to [email protected] from your UNH student mailbox with a subject line RECOVERY REQUEST. No message body is required.
Thank You For Your Patience,
Vincent P Mangiacapra
Associate Vice President for Information Technology &CIO
04/17/09, 14:38ET:
The restoration of mailboxes is continuing without error. System performance is also continuing to be at a quality level. A completed mailbox restoration time has become very difficult to determine due to the high number of mailboxes and the variation of their size. Every effort is being made to complete the recovery as quickly as possible without taxing system performance. We apologize for previous inaccurate estimated time postings. We appreciate your patience.
04/16/09, 12:00ET:
Last evening it was decided to deploy a second student email server due to the lack of performance in the recovery process that has been deployed on the orginal student email server. The move to the new server required that the process that was restoring the mailboxes on the original email server be paused, but now the restoration process will be more efficient as the mail load is being balanced between the two servers. The goal is to have two student email servers balancing the load therefore performance will be shared and enhanced.
Through the night student mailboxes were moved to the new server. As of this morning 92 GB of data has been moved over to the second server- very close to finishing the move of the three smaller mail stores out of a total of 4. I am happy to report that the overall system performance is good and stable to this point. We are continuing to move the old email messages through this process. I am hesitant at this time to give a completion time, but updates will be posted throughout the day on Blackboard monitoring the progress we are making.
Lastly, I have asked that the Undergraduate and Graduate Distribution Lists be available only to Campus Police, Graduate & Undergraduate Admission Office and Student Activities until these issues are resolved. Also, please keep all emails to a manageable size under 1MB.
04/16/09, 11:15ET:
A second server was added to the student email system to help balance the load. This caused a delay in the restoration of older mailbox content but will allow it to complete more quickly.
Every effort is being made to complete restoration of old content(which includes contacts, folders etc) by this afternoon.
While we are restoring the older
messages to the new mailboxes we are also continuing to troubleshoot
and monitor the system. You may periodically notice momentary
performance issues or even a short outage. We will try to keep these to
a minimum but some may be caused by the system itself and we will
respond accordingly.
Complete restoration of all old content may continue until the morning. We appreciate your patience.
04/15/09, 09:06ET:
The system continues to perform well since yesterday’s creation of new
mailboxes. The restoration of old content started last night and continues into
today. It may take until late today for all old messages and other content to
be restored.
04/14/09, 12:12ET:
We are creating new mailboxes for students on our email system. Students will have access to new mail but old mail will not be there immediately until we have verified the performance is back. We will then restore older mail. Please be aware ALL mail is backed up and will be available as soon as we can restore it. We anticipate a 2-3 hour window until we restore the old mail.
04/14/09, 10:03ET:
All maintenance utilities have completed and we have not seen the results we were expecting. The server is up but performance is still very slow. We are continuing to work with Microsoft Technical Support as well as a third party company with expertise in Exchange.
04/13/09, 21:03ET:
We have stopped services again to continue troubleshooting the performance issues, per Microsoft’s suggestion. Services may come up & down throughout the evening. We will continue updates as we have them.
04/13/09, 10:07ET:
Correction: It’s A-O that is not up. P-Z should be working correctly.
04/13/09, 09:05ET:
Message from UNH Director of Networking/Systems Operations Greg Bartholomew: We have been able to restore service to student last names G-Z. Maintenance is still running on the A-F group; this database had the largest problem and required several passes of the utilities. We appreciate everyone’s patience. We are doing all we can to restore service as soon as possible. At this point it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact time but it’s current pace looks like this afternoon but could be end of day. Mail is being queued and delivered as they become online.
04/13/09, 08:35ET:
Student mailboxes G-Z are now connected and should be working.
04/12/09, 20:54ET:
Student Email update: Email should
be back up by Monday morning. The entire email system had to be
rebuilt, and maintenance is still being run.
——-
We have taken down the student email system to
run extensive recovery and maintenance utilities. Service will be
restored to students over the course of the weekend. All should be
completed by Sunday morning. Postings have been made on Blackboard and
a synopsis has been sent to the Charger Bulletin for student
information. Thank you.
——-
04/09/09: 10:07am:
The Charger Bulletin received the following message today regarding student email downtime this week, from UNH Director of Networking/Systems Operations Greg Bartholomew:
Earlier this year we recognized our student email system was going to be in need of extreme maintenance and cleanup. The high number of large/unused mailboxes was starting to affect performance of the system and available storage. We began a plan and schedule to run high-level maintenance on the system. This requires lengthy downtimes, so we were doing our best to apply them during low load times. The first was during Spring Break. As that went longer than expected, we realized the system was in greater need than originally thought.
Our next step was to disconnect all mailboxes with the following criteria: over 75MB, not used for 6 months, and owners were no longer at the school. We left the disconnected mailboxes in the system for 30 days in case any of the owners were still relevant and needed their information. If they were actually using it they should know within 30 days. The 30 day window is set to expire April 13.
It appears the system cannot wait for the maintenance to remove the disconnected mailboxes. We are presently running the extended maintenance to permanently remove these mailboxes and restore system performance. All the removed mailboxes are backed up to tape and will require a longer recovery time if needed.
If there are any other problems affecting the system they will not be recognizable until these issues are cleared up. Our earnest expectation is this maintenance will get us back on track.
The expected completed maintenance time is Sunday morning. Some mailboxes will be up before then as different stages of the maintenance complete.
The Office of Information Technology is sincerely grateful for the understanding and patience of the student body.
Thank you!
Please be sure to utilize Charger Voice for additional problems or questions. You may also email the Charger Bulletin by contacting us (see link at top of page).
