jackal.ru.ac.za, the student file server, suffered a hard disk failure during the course of this morning. Whilst no data was lost, this did result in about half an hour's unscheduled downtime in order to allow us to rectify the problem.
The failed drive has been replaced with a spare and the system is currently rebuilding it's RAID array. Until this process, which should take no more than a couple of hours, is complete jackal will be running in what is known as degraded mode -- this means that there's currently no redundancy in the disk subsystem. It is also likely that, whilst the rebuild occurs, disk access on the machine will be somewhat slower than usual.