Network Failures Kick Students Off Server

A string of problems affecting the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) computer network has denied network access to students across Harvard and intermittently prevented them from checking e-mail since last Saturday.

Coordinator of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98, said that the trouble seemed more serious because the three separate incidences occurred in quick succession.

“I think we have seen a little bit of a coincidence,” Davis said. “Because we have had all three of these events in such short order it has appeared to be a much bigger problem.”

According to a summary of service outages on the FAS Computer Services website, the first of the problems occurred at 11:00 p.m. last Saturday, causing a network service interruption throughout the River Houses until 5:00 a.m. the following morning.

Davis, who is also a Crimson editor, said that computer service employees were actually testing new software designed by Cisco Systems specifically designed to fix a bug during the time of the outage.

Davis said that as part of the repair process, the new updates were installed, which should prevent the problem from occurring in the future.

“Last week we were running tests, but the bug came to fruition before we could put the patch out there,” Davis said.

The second network outage came just 15 hours later at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday night.

In what Davis referred to as a “freak occurrence,” a one-second power outage at a Boston power station caused the network instability.

Davis said that the outage was just long enough to cause several machines to shut down. The return of electricity caused a power surge, interfering with network computers, but normal service was restored soon thereafter.

The third widespread disruption came early yesterday morning. At 12:05 a.m., Unix, web, and e-mail services were cut off as a result of a server error.

Davis said that there was a mechanical glitch in a disk that helps to run the server. He said that engineers came in shortly after and fixed the problem.

“Nothing at this time suggests anything more than a standard, routine hard-drive failure,” Davis said.

Although the problem was fixed by 1:30 a.m., several students found the lack of Internet access to be an inconvenience.

Susan D. Cooley ’06 said that the problem delayed her studying for a listening quiz in Literature and Arts B-63, “Bach in His Time and through the Centuries.”

“It was a little annoying because I was unable to access songs off of the course website,” Cooley said. “But I know that the computer people work hard to fix these problems as quickly as possible.”

Davis said that there has been an effort to improve the consistency and reliability of computer services at Harvard by adding more backup systems.

“Over the last couple of years we have been increasing our redundancy,” Davis said. “Campus-wide network outages have been much fewer this year than in previous years.”

Davis also said that Harvard has spent a lot of money to install devices that provide uninterrupted power supply in case of a power outage.

However, he said it is impossible to prevent network problems everywhere at all times.

“There are over 500 wireless access points, and it doesn’t make sense to spend thousands of dollars to back up all of these access points,” Davis said.

One thing that Davis can say for sure, though, is that the recent problems are not a result of the heavy traffic on the popular website, the facebook.com.

“I can unequivocally say the answer is no,” Davis said. “There’s no connection between them.”