A main server on the University network failed yesterday, cutting off access to the University homepage, Toolkit and other related services for over two hours, Information Technology and Communication officials said.
The server failed at 10:19 a.m., and a replacement server was put into place at 12:28 p.m., according to an ITC report.
Attempts to access pages at the Virginia Web site during the downtime were met with white error screens.
Communications and Systems Director Jim Jokl said this temporary server will remain until the original server is repaired.
Jokl said yesterday's crash was one of the biggest server crashes he can remember.
"The failure was visible because it impacted many systems that people tend to use," he said.
The University has been using its current servers for years, and the servers have proven very reliable, Jokl said. He added that the server crash was analogous to computer crashes that many students may have experienced.
Several students said they were frustrated with the affects of the temporarily-failed server.
Second-year College student Lauren Bruce said she personally was affected because she could not access a grade on Toolkit for several hours. Bruce also said her professor experienced a similar problem.
"I was in one of my classes today, and my professor couldn't pull up the lecture slides from the Toolkit, so she had to wing the lecture," Bruce said. "It was a big class, and it really hindered our learning."
Fourth-year Engineering student Kyle Singleton said his friends were affected by the system failure.
"One of my roommates was pretty frustrated because he couldn't access Toolkit for a class," Singleton said. "If I hadn't [had] the information to give to him, he would have been stuck."
In a separate technology-related incident, part of the University's Web Mail system failed, slowing down the system and blocking access for a large portion of the University community.
Jokl said a disk failure in one of the University's e-mail nodes caused the delay. He added that no data was lost as a result of the incident.
"About a third of the users would have seen mail being slower than usual," he said.
Second-year College student Jessica Dennis said the Web Mail problem frustrated her.
"I needed to get an important e-mail, and it didn't work," Dennis said. "I couldn't even get to the Web site to get to my e-mail."
Dennis said she eventually was able to access the information she needed.
"I had to wait a while, and it finally worked," she said.
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