What the Heck Happened to the Site on Thursday?
At 2:25pm on Thursday, April 8, 2010, Information Systems began emergency work on the database cluster which powers online courses, CoursePlus, the my.jhsph.edu portal, and a number of other sites at the School. Information Systems began this work in the middle of the day only because it was absolutely necessary. Failure to take action would have resulted in potential data loss in the database cluster, and that would have been a Very Bad Thing.™
We were given no prior warning of this maintenance. That's not surprising given the extreme urgency of the situation. We tried to get word out to all of you as quickly as we could by posting a "This site is currently unavailable" message on the online courses and CoursePlus home page. Information Systems also sent out a brief email message to all students, faculty and staff about the issue at 3:39pm.
All sites were back up and running at 5:30pm. Information Systems worked very hard to resolve the problem as quickly as they could. However, this emergency maintenance not only disrupted access to CoursePlus sites and online courses, but also caused the cancellation of at least one LiveTalk session.
We're very sorry for the inconvenience this outage caused. It certainly wasn't planned and everyone involved worked as hard as they could to restore service as quickly as possible.