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BY YI-WEI LIU

In print | Published December 1, 2011

The frequency of campus-wide IT problems, including crashes of Swarthmore’s Mac network, outages for college websites and services such as MySwat and reduced or blocked wireless Internet connectivity for select users, have led to mounting student frustration over the ITS department’s capabilities in maintaining the college’s technology services.

Around a month ago, from mid- to late- October, a series of network failures that lasted intermittently for two weeks caused many problems for students trying to work or simply use college websites. At that time, in an October 28 Daily Gazette article, Information Security Analyst Nick Hannon called the network problem a “brain buster.”

“It seems like one of those things where there are multiple things causing this one symptom, not any one thing we can point at,” Hannon said. In some cases, a laptop could connect to the Internet in one building, but could not in another building. Hannon found no problems using his own laptop, but could not identify the problem with laptops of other users.

After applying a series of network maintenance procedures and vendor upgrades, ITS had fixed many of the college’s network problems.

Yet the problems were not permanently resolved. Based on student reports to ITS, wireless problems and issues with college Mac computers had returned again Monday and Tuesday night this week.
Director of Networking and Telecommunications Mark Dumic believed that this time it was likely that a bug in the network had caused connectivity problems.

“ITS has been attempting to resolve intermittent problems with the wireless network that drop device connections and prevent devices from connecting. ITS will be installing new wireless controller software,” said Dumic in a campus-wide email.

The apparent inability for network issues to be permanently resolved has led to many student complaints directed at the ITS department, Especially because it seriously harms Swarthmore students’ ability to work effectively.

Some have speculated that network problems have their root cause not in technological maladies but in institutional or structural shortcomings of the ITS department itself.

ITS has denied that causes such as lack of funding or failure of communication between members of the department are central to the problem.

“ITS at Swarthmore is well supported by the college. No small college can afford the level of staff and system redundancy required to ensure that there are never any outages — even Google and Amazon have rare outages,” said Chief Information Technology Officer Gayle Barton.

The department said that this fall was particularly challenging, and that a key issue is not lack of communication within the department, but between students and ITS members.

“Some problems are easy to fix once the cause is discovered, but we know that we can’t catch everything. With the wireless connectivity problems, we did not respond as quickly as we could have, had we better information sooner,” Barton said.

According to reports by the ITS Help Desk, once it was determined that Monday night’s problem was widespread, network and telecommunications staff made solving the problem their highest priority.
When they were not able to identify the source of the problem, they contacted the relevant manufacturers to get additional technical support.

Typically, problems are prioritized by the number of people affected and by whether there are alternative short-term solutions.

In this case, the first set of calls received by the Help Desk were handled as individual, one-off, situations. However, it took ITS a while to have enough information to determine that the problem was widespread.

Students can help the ITS staff improve its response to network problems by “immediately letting us know when, and where, problems occur,” said Barton.

This includes problems such as slow wireless speed, inability to connect to the campus Wi-fi, or inability to log on to desktop computers around campus.

“It is essential for us to be able to resolve them. The preferred method for giving ITS this information is by using the “Send a Request” button on the Dash, or sending an email to help@swarthmore.edu,” he added.

As of Wednesday morning, the connectivity problem appears to have been fixed after the installation of new wireless controller software on the previous night, but it is unclear how permanent these fixes will be.

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