Class Server Issues...

Some of you were having trouble with uploading stuff to the class server. Amanda posted a blog regarding the issue. I wanted to give you an update as to what has been going on. Brian Kusch, who is, among other things, responsible for dealing with the college's servers, sent me the following email:

Actually its a "feature" from Apple in their last Panther server update. What happens is the FTP service fails, and then xftpd services start running and then another one starts and another, pretty soon a new one is starting about every 5 minutes until it just chokes the CPU. I had a conversation with our Apple SE the other day and Apple is working on it and hopes to have a fix. Our solution in the meantime is restarting the server every couple of hours. We are trying an experiment over the weekend and turning the ftp service off to see if that helps.

I haven't checked to see whether the issue had been resolved or not. If there are still problems this week, we'll make arrangements for an alternate method of assignment submission.