On the evening of Sept. 8, 2000, at 8:37pm, an off-campus AT&T server crashed and was down for four hours. Unfortunately, on the same night, there was a 10pm deadline for a CAPA problem set in Phys2010. Students attempting to connect to CAPA from some areas off-campus, including the Denver area, could not connect, but students on-campus had no trouble.

Please be aware that the CAPA server is extremely reliable, but the Internet is not. Internet connections to the CAPA server from off-campus (through AOL accounts, etc,) are subject to periodic outages. If a server off-campus crashes, this is a situation over which we have no control. Such outages are a fact of life and occur every month or so for a few hours or more. Your only protection is to start your CAPA set early and/or complete CAPA from on-campus, for instance, from one of the several hundred public-use PC's at CU Boulder.

The CAPA server has never crashed and it has never been "swamped". CAPA can easily service requests from hundreds of students simultaneously. We take full responsibility for the proper functioning of the CAPA system, but we cannot be responsible for connections to the CAPA server from off-campus sites. Students who wait till the last night to complete their CAPA assignment and then try to connect from off-campus are indulging in risky behavior and must accept any consequences.

Sincerely,

Michael Dubson, Capameister