Overheated Computer Servers Plague Penobscot County

By Doug Kesseli, Bangor Daily News, Maine

Jun. 2–BANGOR — Penobscot County officials want to install a sensor in the county’s computer server room to alert them of high temperatures and prevent a server crash like the one that occurred Sunday.

Temperatures in the third-floor room in the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office reached 96 degrees Sunday night causing many of the 21 servers in the building to automatically shut down, Cliff Warren, administrator for Information Technology for the county, said Thursday.

The servers house law enforcement data, radio logs and provide e-mail and Internet access. The last of the servers was back online Monday afternoon after being down for about 20 hours, Warren said. The county’s tech people were working through the week restoring information.

At the Penobscot Regional Communications Center, which dispatches fire, police and other emergency personnel for much of the county, having the servers down meant they had access to some information, but could not enter into the computer log information such as when an officer was off at a scene. For law enforcement agencies it meant police reports also had to be handwritten and later entered into the database.

Warren said the fan in the air conditioning unit remained stuck on slow and couldn’t provide the necessary cooling temperatures. The air conditioner has since been left on high. Also this week county officials talked about installing a sensor that would contact dispatch, the company that installed the cooling system and the county technology people if temperatures get too high. Warren said a system was already in place that would send out pager alerts when the servers’ memory or usage exceeded tolerance levels, but not temperature levels.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Bangor Daily News, Maine

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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