I teach AP Computer Science and other computer classes in a large high
school district with 16 high school campuses. As you might imagine, email is
a very critical component of our communication. Our district email Exchange
server went down sometime late last Friday and four days later, is still
down. The District Office is always very mum when something goes wrong on
their end, no explaination what happenned, no estimate of how long it will
take to fix, and then once it is fixed they act like "see how great we are,
we fixed YOUR problem!" Last year the Exchange server went down and was down
for over a week. That time the person administrating the server had decided
to install some beta Excahnge software the live Exchange server rather than
a testbed. We don't know what is the cause for the outage is this time, at
least not yet, the story is that the exchange server crashed and the backup
died with it.
It is appearant that the person or persons at the district level that
oversees IS does not place much importance on the technology that supports
our day to day function as teachers and as a school. I am sure that large
scale companies have equipment and procedures in place that would keep
mission critical functions such as email up and running even if a server
crashed, and in much less time than a week or more that we seem to
experience. My Principal is fed up and frustrated with the situation and
wants to get some understanding of what could be done to prevent situations
like this in the future. He has agreed to purchase a new server for the
school site that would at least keep school site exchangfe mail up and
running even when the district server is down, but he also wants to suggest
that the district office take stronger proactive steps to mitigate future
email outages. I am not an Exchange expert but I am sure that there are
things that could be done. Such as having a backup Exchange server that
kicks in if the primary crashes. I am looking to the collective to gather a
little information about how real IS departments handle their Exchange
servers and prevent something like a crash from turning into a week long
outage. Is it as simple as having a backup exchange server running as a
mirror? What suggestions can I make?
Thanks,
Jerry
- [H] making Exchange server mission critical Jerry Jones
-
