City of Pullman servers crash

All of the departments within the city of Pullman were affected Thursday when recently purchased hardware suffered a malfunction and crashed the city’s servers.

Information Systems Manager Wayne Brannock said the incident occurred at about 2:30 a.m. and made it so city employees couldn’t access files stored on the server.

The system was still down as of 5 p.m. Thursday.

Brannock said he and city IT personnel are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

“We’re probably not going to leave (city hall) until we have a better feeling of where we’re at,” Brannock said.

He said IT is trying to avoid it but there is a chance the city may have to restore the server from backup, which means the city could lose some of its files.

“It could be any type of data that is stored on the servers,” Brannock said.

He said he hopes the city doesn’t lose any data, but if they have to restore from backup there’s no telling how much data, or what data, would be lost.

“Different servers back up at different times, so who knows what will be lost,” Brannock said.

He said city staff are instructed to back up their documents on the server.

Brannock said the system was first put to use last weekend, and there weren’t any problems with it until this one presented itself.

He said Spillman, the dispatch software Whitcom uses, wasn’t affected by the downed servers, nor was the city’s Internet service.

The new hardware was referred to as Virtual Infrastructure and allowed staff to run multiple servers on one piece of hardware.

City Supervisor Mark Workman said the hardware cost the city about $180,000.