I could not find anything about this on the school system web site.
Then I saw that the Yahoo news story was April 1,
so the possibility exists that I am an April fool.
I went looking for alternative sources & found
Prevent another crash using paper and pencil backup.
Michael Russ, Director of Technology for the EVCS said the computer
failure was a freak accident caused by too many hardrive failures for
the back up system to keep up with.
I can identify with that ... really a budget issue ... what's needed now
is not in the budget until the next bond issue passes, then maybe even not
then.
The IBM engineers may be quoted as claiming the problem was unprecedented,
but the reason for backups is that no hardware lasts to infinity. It is
also the reason for IBM RAID technology. It all fails at one time or
another, and I have witnessed what they are describing several times in my
career.
* A S/34 had a crash in which it would run, but some hard disk sectors
were kaput. We could not do a compress or access certain applications,
while waiting on the replacement drive. The IBM engineers said they had
never seen anything like that ever happen before.
* A S/36 was disassembled in a move, and on reassembly we could not access
drive # 1 which had the security stuff needed to access the diagnostics.
Fortunately the CEO was there watching the IBM engineers, so we got a
paper on company letterhead with his signature authorizing the IBM
engineers to circumvent IBM's great security. We were not allowed to
watch how they did it.
* A S/36 had a hard drive that was 13 years old. It was rated mean time
to failure 13 years. I tried to explain to management what that meant,
but they were not buying my warning. But it failed exactly when IBM
predicted it would, 13 years after IBM predicted it. IBM engineering is
great! They talked me thru on the phone how to do a current backup of
everything except the hardisk sectors that were worn out.
* Our previous AS/400 had its UPS batteries go dead after 5 years and we
misread the error messages, then when the replacement UPS battery came in,
a co-worker did not read the directions, saying they are for people who do
not know what they are doing. Flash bang, he demonstrated why the
directions should be read, so we had to get another UPS.
* Due to brain dead IBM accounting, we switched to SERVIT for hardware
service, then discovered they superior to IBM service. Before any
maintenance, routine or otherwise, they always ask us if we have a current
backup before they do any work on our AS/400.
My computing career started in the 1960's.
For every one IBM server I have witnessed have a crash,
I have witnessed maybe 10,000 or more Microsoft Intel server crashes.
Not 10,000 different machines.
On the same IBM machine we go for years between crashes.
Other platforms cannot hold a candle to that performance.
http://www.14wfie.com/Global/story.asp?S=8103576&nav=menu54_1
Also, anyone who filed a job application with the school system since Jan
23, will have to re-apply.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Quirks/2008/04/02/schools_lose_grades_to_computer_glitch/4062/
>Subject: Indiana school district wipes out high school grades
in [RISKS] Risks Digest 25.11
This issue is archived at <
http://www.risks.org> as
<
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.11.html>
The current issue can be found at
<
http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>
>from the school's website of Evansville, Indiana
>
>"... The Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation recently experienced
a
>hardware malfunction with its AS400 computer server resulting in a loss
of
>student grades...
>
>" Following scheduled maintenance on March 27, 2008, disk errors
occurred.
>After working with IBM engineers around the clock to mitigate data
loss, the
>engineers determined that due to an unfortunate and very rare
combination of
>hardware problems and backup configuration settings, all student grade
book
>assignment data for the current grading period is no longer in the
>system. Harrison, North and Bosse High Schools and Harwood Middle
School -
>all on the six-week grading period - lost four weeks of individual
>assignment grades that had been posted."
>
>rest:
http://www.evscschools.com/
>
> [Also noted by Jim Reisert.
>
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080401/ap_on_re_us/grades_gone_1
> PGN]
midrange.com
