Holdings Maintenance revisited

Yesterday afternoon the HelpDesk received many calls about access to the Maintenance Holdings tab of NHU-PAC. I was really stumped by this since the usual method of fixing the server is a simple and quick reboot. The procedure did not help. In moving to the next level of support for the servers that DoIT (NH Department of Information Technology) hosts for NHAIS one of the engineers mentioned that this was the 21st call they had about server malfunctions. The cause - that malicious worm that was going around the Internet on April 1. The solution provided by McAfee was to reassign the permissions on certain files so they could not be executed from certain directories within the schema of the computer.

This is probably a good short term fix but the complication with the Maintenance Holdings computer, called Catalog, is that it is a desktop PC promoted to server status. While it can deal with MOST of the work you throw its way it is getting on in computer years and new tasks requiring lots of memory are difficult to complete. Thus yesterday, (4/1/09) while it was dealing with the McAfee solution to the worm it was unable to do its regular work of updating holdings information.

Today Catalog appears to be back to normal. One of the benefits of yesterday's difficulty is that I have contacted SirsiDynix with a query as to what is happening with the move of the software from Catalog to Gnu (Old NHU-PAC server). Their top notch programer was trying to figure out how this particular module was installed and move it over to a real server, Gnu, with lots more memory and fewer years.

I believe today will allow for normal Holdings Maintenance work.

Charlie
(121 days)