Ironically, the day the school got back online was the same day it had a scheduled data dump that would have backed up all the university's data to a site in Las Vegas run by provider SBWH, which has roots in Santa Barbara.

That was now on hold, but DeWeese called SBWH, the school's disaster-recovery vendor, and they offered engineer Paul Fisher to help clear rack space the company rents 10 miles from Santa Barbara with Tw Telecom, which just happens to be the provider of Internet lines for the university and of infrastructure for emergency services such as fire fighting.

Tw Telecom found a chassis to house the blades, the DPM platform was plugged in and the network was now safely running miles from the threat of flames that would escape containment for another seven days while consuming 8,733 acres.E-mail was the first thing brought back online by Niv Dolgin, the director of IT services for SADA Systems, the school's remote e-mail management provider.

But a snag came when DeWeese discovered that Fielding's disaster-recovery plan neglected to account for changes to IP address and DNS updates after the move to a new location.

"That is one of the things we would have found out in the move to Vegas," DeWeese said.

The IP addresses were key for connections to the school's online library, a collection of about 1,000 databases subscribed to by the university.

Alain Dussert, the school's director of library services, led the effort to contact the database vendors so they could enter new IP addresses on their end.

"That is what took the longest to set up. Otherwise, we would have been up in an hour," DeWeese said.

The disaster recovery also included redirecting phone lines. DeWeese found a VoIP line to use with CIO Solutions, the school's virtual network administrator." CIO Senior Engineer David Ashamalla helped handle that and a majority of the move's technical work.

The phone provided a recorded message for staff and students. In addition, the school's provost used her Facebook profile to do updates, and help desk requests were routed past the help desk system and straight to the coordinator's personal in-box.All the messages eventually funneled staff and students to the school's Epsilen.com social networking site, where all information was being aggregated.

The only network piece orphaned was an ERP system running on IBM's AIX hardware.

IBM said it would void the warranty if the school moved it, but IBM promised to come out in five days to do it themselves. The school declined and the system was offline until the IT staff returned to the office.