Dear LibAgent subscriber,
You may have noticed that LibAgent's web site was inaccessible over the last few days. In addition, you may have noticed that your book loans were not extended over the weekend, and warnings about books due back to the library were not delivered.
This was all the result of what appears to be a hardware problem with the machine running LibAgent, and a chain of events causing this problem to take longer to correct than was hoped. Here is an account of this incident:
Early Thursday morning (around 2:45am), LibAgent's server locked up. It would not allow any form of remote access, and stopped providing all services (mail, web site, etc.). This happened as it was busy extending your book loans, an operation which heavily taxes its limited resources. This is something that happens to it every few months, for no apparent reason (it's little surprise, given how ancient this machine is - those of you who are interested are invited to look here for a good laugh). We are doing our best to pinpoint the root of these problems, but up to this moment our best guess is bad disk blocks.
Once the outage was noticed, we tried to contact people who are physically in the position to press the 'reset' button on this machine. There is a bit of explaining to do here: The two main maintainers of LibAgent currently live in the US, and continue to work on LibAgent on their spare time, mainly because no one was willing to make the commitment to replace them when they graduated from the Technion. Returning to our original story, it happens that on the exact same day the server on which mail is delivered for LibAgent's local volunteer was undergoing maintenance, making it impossible for him to read the message asking him to reset the machine. We tried and get other people we know at the Technion to do that, but by the time they got to the machine the weekend already started, and they didn't have a key to the room where the machine is. The bottom line? Only on Sunday morning did the machine reset...
You must be asking yourself now "Very sad story, but is that the kind of service I deserve?" Well, we are doing our best to make things more reliable in the future. In fact, just last week we received a second machine from the Computer Science Department at the Technion, and we hope to switch our services to this more capable machine before long.
You can also help us. Take a look here for things you can help us with (not all of them require programming or hardware donations!). And last, the short answer to the above question is "You get what you pay for!". While we are truly doing our best, we can give no guarantee that such outages will not repeat. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
Once again, we regret any inconvenience caused, and promise to do our best in the future, as we have done in the past, to make LibAgent a reliable and useful service.
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Regards, LibAgent's news agent.