Those of you who have read my blog for some time may remember that I had to move location at one point, due to an unexpected outage. That was a faculty based server – rather than a University provided one.
We’ve also had incidents when significant sections of the University system go down, either for planned maintenance, or unexpectedly. Luckily we’ve never, as far as I can remember had the whole University system down for a full weekend, as Bath are planning. I’m not sure, though, what’s better – to have all services down for the same weekend – or to have different services down at different times. Clearly, either is much better than having all services down unexpectedly, as can happen. (See Jeremy’s comment on Brian’s post). They had a couple of ways of communicating with users (not sure if it was students / staff / anyone who’d signed up to SMS / who..) – which is, of course vital. (I’ve seen the occasional moan in Twitter when Gmail has gone down…)