September 8, 2012; 8:00 PM
As previously reported, the MS Exchange email system, serving the University’s faculty, staff and administrators, had a serious problem beginning early morning Thursday (9/06). The likely root cause of this problem has been identified and isolated (see the blog post http://blogs.shu.edu/doit/2012/09/ms-exchange-the-cause-of-the-crash/ for details). All users now have access to their MS Exchange email.
Note that you may have to restart MS Outlook to force Outlook to reconnect to the server. You should also check your Out Box and release any email that you composed in Outlook but which Outlook was unable to send because the server was offline. If you are having difficulty connecting through MS Outlook, try WebMail (a.k.a., Outlook Web Access, or OWA; the link to WebMail/OWA is in the upper right hand corner of the SHU Web site and along the top navigation of PirateNet).
If you had access to your email box any time Thursday (9/6) or Friday (9/7) afternoon, then all your email has been recovered.
If access to your email was restored late Friday night or today (9/8), then IT Services is recovering your email from multiple sources, as described in a prior blog post (see http://blogs.shu.edu/doit/2012/09/update-regarding-access-to-the-microsoft-exchange-email-system/ for details). IT Services restored your email box from a backup taken early Wednesday morning. Email that was sent after the server crash early Thursday morning is in a pending queue that is being delivered now. Once this pending email is delivered, you will have all your email except that sent to you on Wednesday, 9/05. This email will be recovered from another source, the MS Exchange logs and journals, next week and merged in to your In Box. Since recovery from the MS Exchange logs and journals is labor intensive, it may take the better part of next week to complete this recovery process for all users.
I want to thank the University community for their patience and support during this difficult few days. I want to thank the IT Services team who spent long hours working to fix this problem; their effort, dedication and knowledge has been outstanding. And I want to thank the support teams from Microsoft and NetApp for their help during this time.
I want to remind everyone that, while everyone currently has access to the campus mail system, some significant challenges still remain. We’re running on a temporary server, so next week IT Services will be adding additional servers to the MS Exchange cluster to improve reliability and performance. Until then, we may experience additional intermittent email outages as IT Services continues to work on the system. IT Services will work next week to restore Wednesday’s email for those users who are missing it. And other cleanup tasks remain. I ask for the continued patience and support of the University community as we restore full email service to the campus.
Steve Landry, CIO
I still do not have email access
Have you tried accessing email through WebMail (Outlook Web Access)? You can access WebMail through PirateNet. This will determine if the problem is on the server or your Outlook or mobile device settings. – - SGL
Although the posting says all email is restored I am still not able to access mine either on my laptop or my Droid phone. Was the server changed and therefore I need to change the settings to my Droid? I have tried to shut down Outlook and I get a login screen that keeps popping up when I click OK.
Have you tried accessing email through WebMail (Outlook Web Access)? You can access WebMail through PirateNet. This will determine if the problem is on the server or your Outlook or mobile device settings. Once we determine which side the problem is on we can work with you to resolve it. You should call the Service Desk and let them know, or if you prefer, I can open a Service Ticket for you via email.- – SGL
Hi Stephen,
I did as you suggested and am to access email through PirateNet. It looks a little different but I am able to access it. What would this indicate for my mobile device settings?
So your email box is available on the server, but for some reason MS Outlook and Android aren’t finding it. They should both find your email box automatically, but it may be the case they’ve been disconnected so long they’re no longer trying to connect. I’d try a full restart of your Droid (power it down, wait a minute, and let it reboot) and your laptop (try a full reboot). Those may force the clients to re-find and reconnect to the SHU email server. If not, call the Service Desk tomorrow and we can have a tech take a look at your laptop and Droid. – - SGL
I appreciate the posts here this morning between 7AM and 9AM reporting that the MS Exchange server was down. I apologize for not getting an update out to the community sooner this morning; due to the timing of this most recent incident, IT Services was short handed when this latest incident occurred this morning and weren’t able to get the updates out as quickly as we had over the weekend. Please note, however, that this discussion thread is not set up to report or resolve problems. If you need assistance with your email, the quickest way is to call the Technology Service Desk at 973-275-2222. Problems reported here won’t get into technicians’ “to do’s” as quickly as calling 2222.
In response to some of the questions about when a permanent fix would be made, please keep the following in mind. This is our first major problem with MS Exchange in the three and a half years it has served the University community, and the incident that occurred was very serious, damaging the servers and corrupting the file systems. Despite the severity of the problem, IT Services, Microsoft and NetApp have identified the and isolated the software bug that caused the problem and have restored basic service to the community, although not yet with all the reliability and features we’re accustomed to. Work is continuing to restore full service. In the meantime, I ask the continued patience and support of the community as we restore email lost in the data corruption, move the temporary server to a new MS Exchange server cluster, and resolve some issues with mobile access.
Steve Landry, CIO
Hi,
I tried what you suggested I’m able to log in to my e-mail via Microsoft Outlook & Webmail. But I still can’t get mail on my iPhone. I powered down the unit completely and waited for about 5 minutes then I turned it back on still can’t get e-mail on it. The error I get is “Cannot Get Mail The connection to the server failed.” I also went into settings and re-typed my password into the required fields and I get a check mark that all is fine, but when I go back into the e-mail cannot receive anything with the message above.
Thanks
Steve
While I’ve spoken to many users whose iOS and Android devices have re-connected to the new server automatically, some users are reporting they can’t access email from iOS or Android devices. If you’ve tried powering down and restarting, the next step would be to delete the account on your device and then re-install the connection to MS Exchange. Call the Technology Service Desk and they can assist you with the correct settings for the new server. SGL