HEMI CONTINGENCY PLANS FOR HURRICANE RITA

[Updated Status as of 9/26/05 3:15 pm EDT]

Updated Current Status:

JSC has weathered Hurricane Rita relatively unscathed.  The HEMI infrastructure has been brought online.  All users who had temporary mailboxes at MSFC have been moved back to their permanent mailbox at JSC. All mail has been moved back from the temporary accounts at MSFC to JSC and users should see all of their messages in their mailbox. If you can not see all of your current and past e-mail (e-mail received prior to Saturday, September 23), please call the IT Help Desk at 202-358-4357.
 
The 1,572 HEMI accounts that were moved to MSFC before JSC was powered down Friday will remain at MSFC until a plan is developed to return the accounts to JSC with little or no user impact.
 
Updated Blackberry Status

We are still working through some lingering effects from the emergency Blackberry moves. Any Blackberry users who are still experiencing problems should double-check their settings and if necessary re-cradle their Blackberry. Instructions for this can be found later on this page, in the section below labeled "Blackberry Status". If problems persist, please call the IT Help Desk at 202-358-4357.
 
Cell phone service on Treos and Blackberrys was not be affected by any of these actions.

[Status as of 9/25/05 1 pm EDT]

A significant portion of the Headquarters Enterprise Messaging Initiative (HEMI) service is provided by the NASA Data Center (NDC), Johnson Space Center location. With the implementation of contingency plans in respons to Hurricane Rita, Headquarters IT and Communications Division staff have been actively working with our HEMI service providers at the NDC on contingency operations. This site will be the primary location and method of user notification until HEMI services return to normal operations.

Current System State
All systems at JSC remain powered down and electricity to the building housing the HEMI servers remains off. We are fully capable of supporting users for an indefinite period of time at the NDC at Marshall Space Flight Center if the NDC at JSC experiences damage, and/or the building hosting our HEMI servers has been damaged or destroyed.

Email accounts and mailboxes were migrated from JSC to MSFC right up to the moment that services were powered down at JSC.

Unfortunately, we were unable to move all the mailboxes from JSC to MSFC. For those accounts we were unable to migrate, we have created TEMPORARY NEW HEMI MAILBOXES at MSFC.

This means that the first time you log-in to your HEMI account, you might ONLY see e-mail and calendar items from the date and time your new mailbox was created at MSFC. All prior mail and calendar data saved on the servers at JSC is temporarily inaccessible. Access to this data will be reestablished once we return to normal service. However, if your Outlook/Entourage client was left configured at its original settings to use “cached mail” (mail saved locally to your hard drive), you will be able to re-establish connections to the new mail account, while at the same time keeping the older mail that was saved locally on your workstation. We will work to restore prior e-mail to your account, but this may take several days. In the meantime, the instructions below will allow you to make use of older “cached” e-mail during this interim period.

If Your Email Account Was Not Migrated: What To Do

To determine if your account was one of the accounts not moved and newly re-created at MSFC, launch a web browser and go to Outlook Web Access (OWA) at https://webmail.nasa.gov. On the page that appears, click on the Headquarters (HQ) link. Log in with your regular user account and password. Once your e-mail appears, look for any mail received prior to Saturday, September 24. If you see your past e-mail, all of your data was migrated properly – you can exit from OWA and launch your Outlook or Entourage program to use your email. If you do NOT see older email, click on the appropriate link below and follow these instructions:

PC/Outlook Users: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/hemi/documents/09_25_05/outlook.doc
Mac/Entourage Users: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/hemi/documents/09_25_05/entourage.doc

Treo Status

The Goodlink server that delivers messages to Treos is hosted at MSFC and did not need to be moved. When an individual's mailbox is moved to MSFC, message delivery will "transfer" within the Goodlink server and it will continue to deliver data to the user's Treo. No user action will be required.

Blackberry Status

We had some lingering effects from the emergency Blackberry moves last night. We have fixed the issues and recommend that Blackberry users who are still experiencing problems double-check their settings and if necessary re-cradle their Blackberry. Instructions for this can be found here:

Blackberry Configuration Instructions: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/hemi/documents/09_25_05/bb.doc

Cell phone service on Treos and Blackberrys was not be affected by any of these actions.

Should you have any questions regarding these events or plans, or to be provided with updated information, please contact the IT Help Desk at 358-HELP (4357), 1-866-4NASAHQ (462-7247), mailto:service@hq.nasa.gov, or http://www.odin.lmit.com/hq/helpdesk.html.