Students, faculty, and staff have experienced problems with the campus server since the beginning of the school year.

Hopefully, the end to those problems is near.

Information Technology & Services (IT&S) will have a new server installed by Feb. 9. Student share spaces will be moved from the server Hobbs to the as-yet-unnamed server. The new server should help split campus traffic so that the time it takes to log in and out should decrease drastically. IT&S staff hopes this will solve the campus network problems.

“The servers are not cutting-edge technology but they’re still powerful,” James Lyons, a sophomore IT&S Help Desk worker, said. “They are fully capable of doing their jobs. It’s just that they’re being asked to do huge amounts of work.”What caused the problems?

Students arrived in August bringing worms, viruses, and trojans with them. The three biggest threats to the campus were the Blaster worm, worms in the Mimail family, and the Admin virus.

The Blaster worm attacked computers running Windows 2000 and XP, causing infected computers to pass on the worm and then crash. Mimail affected both computers and the campus’s connection to the Internet by sending out mass e-mails and attempting to collect secure information from computer users, including credit card and Social Security numbers. The Admin virus also sent out mass e-mails and attempted to crash computers.

IT&S workers contained the threats by turning off dorm Internet access and providing disks to clean computers.

All three threats are still present on networked computers, mainly because many students are not aware of the problems, or that they can be fixed. IT&S still offers disks that will eradicate the Blaster virus, and IT&S Help Desk workers can walk students through the process of “virus-proofing” their computers.

These problems were mainly contained by the time midterms hit, though access to the Internet campus-wide was sporadic at best. The unpredictability of the network was then due to multiple causes.

First, the backbone of the residence hall connections to the Internet was a separate network. Over the summer, the technology of that network was upgraded and put back on the main campus network.

Also, the campus installed a restricted firewall fall semester in an effort to minimize risk of infection from other major worms and viruses. This meant that only a certain number of connections to the Internet could be made campus-wide.

Every connection to the Internet was counted separately, and most computers were using multiple connections at a time. Each Internet window is a separate connection, as are pop-up ads and chat boxes of instant messaging programs. It is not unusual for a single computer to have 10 or more connections open at any one time.

When the number of connections met the firewall restrictions, the entire network went down until the system could be reset. This could be done in a matter of minutes if the correct people were on campus, but frequently the server would crash in the middle of the night and stay down until the morning.

The firewall has since been changed to allow an unrestricted number of connections.

IT&S right now-

“Get ready for calls,” IT&S Director Leah Kraus says to a student worker. “I can’t get to my space.” The next instant, the phone rings.

“IT&S help desk,” the student answers the phone. “Hobbs is down.”

It’s 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 22. Classes are winding down and students are logging off of computers all over campus. Everyone is making demands of Hobbs, and Hobbs doesn’t like it at all.

“Think of it like a road,” Kraus said. “There are all these cars trying to get through a bottleneck at one time. The road gets backed up.”

The road is the campus network; the bottleneck is the Hobbs server.

And the drivers – in this case students and faculty – are getting frustrated.

“Hobbs is perfectly capable of handling the traffic generated by the campus,” Kraus said. “But asking Hobbs to handle the traffic of every user at once is a little much.”

There are now two network cards in the Hobbs server, which should help increase traffic flow even during high demand times.

With all of these improvements to the campus network, students should expect to see a decrease in technology problems. But these may be only temporary fixes. As the college’s population continues to increase, larger demands will be made of the campus facilities.

“There are too many users, not enough servers,” senior IT&S Help Desk worker Christin Guilick said.

The Plan-

In the online-newsletter Guilford Beacon sent Jan. 23, IT&S announced its intentions to begin reorganization of the campus resources. By Feb. 9, student share spaces will be moved from the Hobbs server to a new one. The new server, as yet unnamed, has the storage capacity for seven terabytes of disk space.

The server has been on campus since September, but IT&S has been unable to install it before now. The department is currently down two staff members – one in telecommunications and one in multimedia. The remaining staff has split the extra duties among themselves.

Between threats to the campus network and regular duties, there hasn’t been time for the new server to be installed.

“We’re bringing in consultants Feb. 3 – 5 to help with the installation and hopefully spot potential problems to the Internet could be made campus-wide.

Every connection to the Internet was counted separately, and most computers were using multiple connections at a time. Each Internet window is a separate connection, as are pop-up ads and chat boxes of instant messaging programs. It is not unusual for a single computer to have 10 or more connections open at any one time.

When the number of connections met the firewall restrictions, the entire network went down until the system could be reset. This could be done in a matter of minutes if the correct people were on campus, but frequently the before they occur,” Kraus said.