The vague claim of Imperial College Union to be even partly technologically competent has taken a terrible beating over the past week with two different web servers failing at the same time.

First to bite the dust was the C&GCU Intranet server which shuffled off its mortal coil at around 5:30pm last Monday after the installation of a seemingly innocuous security patch. After eventually gaining access to the machine room where the server is housed, deep in the bowels of the Mechanical Engineering building, bumbling C&GCU technicians (fresh from taking their City & Guilds typing exams) proceeded to press all the buttons on the machine before eventually deciding that it would need to be removed to be repaired. Although the C&GCU server is backed up onto tape every night the removal of the machine deprived City & Guilds College Union of both its main fileserver and its much vaunted Intranet. Through a series of stops and starts that included both a partial restore from the backup tapes and a complete re-installation of the operating system the machine was brought back on-line on Thursday afternoon - although full functionality was not restored until late Friday night. Your correspondant can't help but feel that C&GCU Treasurer Oliver Pell's comment in the recent issue of Guildsheet - "bugger" - seems to nicely describe the entire situation.

Second to fall (and much more interesting) was Imperial College Union's main webserver 'allsop' - some time on Tuesday afternoon. The loss of the server, which hosts virtually all club and society websites at Imperial College (with the principal exception of some Departmental Societies and IC Radio) was a serious blow to many clubs and societies. Most importantly, the failure brought down both Live! and the C&GCU Internship Centre website - only days after an article in the City & Guilds alumni magazine 'IC Engineer' invited alumni to visit the site. Live! has heard unconfirmed reports that Allsop, which was scheduled for a software upgrade partly to fix several known security vunerabilities, was compromised by an unknown assailant. It is believed that the server did not actually fail, but was cut off from the internet by the Information and Communication Technologies router after the machine started behaving oddly.

Not content with restoring their own server, City & Guilds College Union minions Mustafa Arif, Richard Tang and Oliver Pell seemed to take it upon themselves to restore C&GCU websites as soon as possible. To this aim one of the computers in the C&GCU office appears to have undergone a rapid transformation from friendly happy-looking Windows 2000 workstation to a unfriendly console-brandishing Unix server. After successfully hosting a 'we're not working at the moment' page for Thursday and Friday of last week the server did host a 'Live! Emergency Edition' reconstructed from old backups of the Live! database from Saturday. Full Live! functionality was only restored earlier today following a series of comic hurdles encountered while trying to retrieve the latest database and Live! webpages from Allsop. Live! has learnt that Sam Sharpe (one of ICU's web editors as well as being - according to Andy Heeps - the world's most mocked politician) tried several times to transfer the relevant files across but was only finally successful today. "You would be surprised how much work this all involved," one C&GCU source remarked earlier. "But at least we're back and running now."

The City & Guilds College Union backup server is now hosting all C&GCU websites and is expected to continue to do so for the immediate future until the main ICU server is restored to health. "Well, we were only down for six days," said C&GCU Media Group Developer Richard Tang. "That's not brilliant," added Mr Pell, "but it could be worse." Simon suspects that they both may be right - but six days downtime after a couple of simple server failures still manages to put the 2-3 hours downtime regularly endured by Computing students in perspective. Hmmmm.