I’m not up at school today and I don’t know the whole story, but my EMU email isn’t working right now, and the server that hosts my students’ web pages is down, too.
Apparently, there was a “small flood” in the basement where they keep these servers. Oddly, the advice being offered from the ICT folks to department secretaries (who were then passing this message on to faculty and staff) is to turn off computers. I called the computer help desk to ask about this just now, and when I asked about this, the tech support person said “That’s to avoid a short from the server that could fry the motherboards.”
“Really?” I asked. “If that’s the case, shouldn’t I unplug the computer, maybe disconnect the ethernet cable?”
“No, just turn it off,” tech support guy said. Hmmm… me thinks I am being fed a shovel-full….
In any event, I was told they want to have the servers up again by 5 pm our time, but I think this is the “last strike” for me and EMU’s computer system. It crashes like a demolition derby driver; in contrast, the system that hosts stevendkrause.com has never crashed (at least not in my recollection) in two years. Putting two and two together, and it seems like it’s time to migrate everything (class web sites, academic web sites, all my email, etc.) over to something that I’m paying for and that seems to work all the time.