[PLUG] Why are PSU network services...

[drew wymore]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:28 AM, Michael Robinson <plug_1 at robinson-west.com
> wrote:

> going to be down on November 20?  Shouldn't PSU have a high
> availability set up?  OHSU for patient records uses a hidden
> off site data center that is secured.  Why doesn't PSU do this?
>
> I suppose I and anyone else who is a PSU student got an announcement
> that most services are going to be down after 7 pm on the 20th.
>
> I don't have a backup site for my DSL hosted one, but I'm not a
> University serving 1000s of people.  I'm starting to question the
> competence of PSU's IT staff where being in computer science that
> is of great concern to me.  There was a major outage not long ago.
> PSU seems to be doing construction all over campus, aren't the
> network services being worked on too?
>
> If you are a PSU staff person, please don't be offended.  Some of
> you are very dedicated good professors.  Others, I honestly wonder
> what you are doing there.  I'm not going to list any names because
> that would be stupid and rude.
>
> If you are a PSU student, you are sinking literally thousands of
> dollars into an education that is likely going to be the foundation
> of your future career.  Some of the information in those computer
> systems is personal information.  I expect PSU to have an off site
> secured data center and I expect use of a high availability server
> configuration.  Servers should be on multiple electrical circuits
> preferably in multiple buildings, all of them secured appropriately
> depending on the level of data that they contain.  This is what I
> expect.  Am I OTL?  What is the reality at PSU?
>
> I'm increasingly wondering if I should take myself elsewhere for
> multiple reasons, the issue of PSU's network reliability being
> one of them.
>
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I don't go to PSU but I wonder if it's a switch or router maintenance rather
than something like servers going down. I don't know they're architecture or
design so I can't posit a good answer. Maybe you could actually ask them
what exactly they are going to be working on. If they are doing electrical
work, even if they had diverse data centers the core on campus, if affected
wouldn't let you access the data in these facilities anyways.

Drew-