Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

A "critical hardware failure" caused the Rhode Island General Assembly Web site to crash Monday at around 4 p.m., and is not expected to be up and running again before Wednesday, said House spokesman Larry Berman.

"We are awaiting a replacement part that is being shipped here from Colorado. Our entire Web site is down, and no one can access it either internally or externally," Berman said.

Once the part arrives, "the problem is, it also takes several hours to install. They're hoping they get the part today, and will work into the night," in order to bring the site back online by sometime Wednesday morning.

So for now, the General Assembly is returning to "the days of old."

That means: paper. Paper House and Senate calendars and paper committee hearing notices. Paper, paper paper.

"It's not going to stop us from having our sessions today or having commitee hearings. We're printing everything out," Berman said.

But he acknowledged that the timing "couldn't have been worse," given a hectic day for legislators as Governor Carcieri introduces his budget for the fiscal year beginning in July. (The budget is accessible on the governor's budget Web site, which is functioning).

Berman said that State House staff and others working at the building noticed that the site had crashed around 4 p.m. Monday, "and several people called within a matter of minutes to the Legislative Data Systems" within the building. "They hoped it would be something minor, but it turned out to be something major."

Berman added, "The General Assembly survived for hundreds of years without computers, so I guess we can survive" for another day.

 Tags  politics Providence RI General Assembly state budget State House

Comments

Klark said:

Perhaps the state should outsource the hosting of their site. Or, at least have a hot spare for cases like this.

Link | March 10, 2009 3:06 PM
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Tony Pelliccio said:

Legislative Data Systems needs to understand that the legislature web and information portal is critical. As such there should be redundancy.

As a former state employee I've seen how state agencies cheap out when it comes to critical items.

In only one office were we able to create a Network Operations Center that we believed was fault tolerant. We identified and verified that our dependence on DoIT for DNS services was the Achilles heel.

I had aggressively pushed that we maintain a backup of the state DNS services in our offices since we had broadband service and redundant power. But of course that fell upon deaf ears because in state government, everyone had their little fiefdoms.

Link | March 11, 2009 11:12 AM
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