Power outage in Castro Valley

A power outage in Castro Valley on the morning of Jan. 23, caused the Castro Valley Unified School District’s Internet to go offline.  Because the Internet was offline, there was a huge inconvenience to everyone in the district.

Usually the district’s large backup battery would supply the data room that manages servers and network connections for the district with the power to keep it running.  But in this case, the backup battery was used up before the power came back on.  This caused the system to shut down its servers.

“The shutdown process worked as designed and no data stored on servers was damaged or lost.  However, one of the switches that manages network communication lost its configuration,” said Bruce Gidlund, the district’s technology director.

Therefore the Internet was still down, even though the power was back on.  This could not have been fixed easily because the only way to know that this was the problem was only through the process of elimination of the other possible problems.  The server was easily fixed after the problem was identified.

While the district was fixing the problem, CVHS had no Internet connection.  Teachers of the computer classes were reviewing for finals, but the server crash frustrated some teachers because the curriculum was online.

“It was frustrating, but I understand this happens,” said computer teacher Chris Burns.

The Internet connection problem did not only affect the computer classes, it also affected everybody at the school.  The teachers couldn’t go on Aeries to take attendance and students couldn’t go online to check their grades.

Even though the Internet connection was having problems, the tech support at CVHS could not do a thing about it.

“The district had problems.  We can just wait for it to be fixed,” said Monica Herendeen, computer support technician.

Luckily, the problem only lasted for a day.  But sadly it was right before finals and it was a huge inconvenience for both students and teachers.