What happens if a server fails?
If a Kerberos, LDAP, or AFS database server fails very little happens, the clients just fall over to another slave server and go on their merry way. However, if a fileserver fails every Read/Write volume served from that fileserver goes offline. Basically, this means that every home-directory volume served from that fileserver will be unavailable until that server comes back online or we restore all the affected volumes from tape to a new fileserver. Should the mail server hardware fail we have redundant hardware ready to put in place to resume service ASAP, and the mail spool disks are mirrored such that both disks would have to fail at once in order to lose data. If, in the unlikely event both spool disks fail at once, we will have to restore to the redundant system from tape backups CS performs nightly.
