Originally Published 18 September 2003

Major disruption occurred to the campus data network yesterday, starting at around 2:55pm. The disruption was caused by failure of a piece of equipment (a 10 gigabit ethernet line card) in one of the four core switches.

The fault was isolated with help from our suppliers by 3:50pm, and the faulty card was manually disabled. A configuration change has now been made on all four core switches which would - had it been in place before the problem started - have prevented the fault from occurring by automatically disabling the card (having implemented the change, the card has now been disabled automatically).

Our supplier is currently investigating whether these configuration changes should be made on the rest of the equipment in the network to prevent similar, more localised, problems from occurring due to failure of that equipment.

More detail on the precise cause of the problem is available on the ITS website, at

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/its/aboutus/majordisruption/

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience that this disruption caused at this very busy time of year.

Chris Tilbury
Head of Service, IT Services, University of Warwick
Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL.

Telephone: 024 7652 3365
Facsimile: 07876 88 01 16
Mobile: 07876 21 77 90