T-Square has returned back online following recurrent server failures occurring earlier this week. The website returned back online late Wednesday night.
“We’re getting at a point where [T-Square is] stable again. We don’t know what triggered it,” said Clay Fenlason, OIT director of Educational Technology.
Beginning the afternoon of Monday, Oct. 19, Tech students and faculty again found themselves experiencing problems with T-Square. Certain applications of the website had been down periodically as a result of server failures, which have made uploaded files and attachments inaccessible.
According to Fenlason, T-Square itself and its databases were fine; however, the infrastructure team had been having problems with back file storage, particularly in services related to the Banner system and the College of Management’s data storage. Services that were affected by this failure included Techworks, Peoplesoft financials, GTED and gtwebapps. Servers storing uploaded files and attachments on T-Square had been problematic, rendering the website unusable until Wednesday night.
Before fully recovering, T-Square administrators explained in an announcement that while access to uploaded files or the ability to upload new ones, including assignments, resources or other areas that involve attachments, has been experiencing issues, the application itself would continue to be up and running. Activities that do not require the use of files, such as chat, wiki pages and announcement postings were still accessible and are in service.
Because T-Square has a very large volume of files and content, however, the process to fully restore T-Square did not finish until Thursday afternoon.
“What’s basically happening is that the files are being trickled back into the system as there is a full back-up,” Fenlason said. “As of [Thursday], we’re looking for the last [file] to be in place. We’ll go through and check that we haven’t missed anything.”
Wednesday night, T-Square administrators released also the following apology on their website: “We deeply regret the severe disruption to coursework we know this has caused, and will be reviewing the hardware issues thoroughly to make sure this can’t happen again.”
Fenlason and the T-Square team will be determining the cause of the failure over the next week.