News about the flood in YNiC

Dear Colleagues and Users As you may have heard, there has was a major flood within the Biocentre building on Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately we only found out about this when computers went off line. By that time water had been leaking into our area for about two hours. It took a further three hours before the problems were brought under control. Water came through the ceilings into YNiC and has caused damage within a number of rooms. The most seriously affected area was the server room. Mark Hymers and his colleagues managed to get a large amount of the equipment out of the room but not before some serious damage had been done. We now have to assess the extent of that damage. I am sorry to say that this will take time. We have already emptied water out of many disc drives, servers, network switches and power supplies. In other words we are very badly affected by this flood. The University insurers have been informed and we are waiting for a loss adjustor to come to the site. A very basic set of services have been re-established. These allow psych-mail and ynic-mail to work as we realise that people would have been greatly affected by the loss of those services. But we have to say that these services are not guaranteed. The machines that are running may have been affected by the water damage and may fail. We may also have to change the servers managing these services at short notice. I apologise for any inconvenience that may be caused. We do not have any other services within YNiC. The desktop computers, data-stores (MEG/MRI), remote access, tape-backups and other core services are not available. As the MRI and MEG devices depend on these services they are also not available. The Scratch spaces within the disc space have been affected and some data/analyses will be lost. Water leaked into the TMS area and is also not useable. I am unable at this stage to tell you when these facilities and resources will be available again. As information becomes available I will let you know of any changes. The YNiC open plan area is not accessible. We have used some desks for the temporary server configuration. Cables have had to be run across the floor and as there are no user accessible services we would be grateful if everyone can stay away from YNiC until further notice. This will affect a large number of people. We will try hard to get serive back to normal. at this stage I cannot tell you when this will be. It will certainly take at least two weeks as we will have to order some replacement machines and discs to be able to get anyway close to normal operation. Gary -- Gary Green York Neuroimaging Centre The Biocentre York Science Park York YO10 5DG tel (+44) (0) 1904 435349 fax (+44) (0) 1904 435356 mobile 07986778954