Network fails, revived

By Rucy Liu     1/27/11 6:00pm

Students and faculty across campus started reporting issues with Internet connectivity last Monday night around 9 p.m. A computer bug had caused the firewall to go down. The lagging network was especially apparent when browsing graphically intensive websites such as Facebook and YouTube. After troubleshooting, Information Technology determined that the firewall needed to be rebooted in order to fix the problem.Networking Manager Dylan Jacob said websites would take a long time to load, if at all.

"By Tuesday morning, we confirmed that Internet connectivity had degraded to an unacceptable level."

The Rice Owls and Rice Visitor networks were both adversely affected by the bug. IT scheduled its repair for the morning of Jan. 21 at 5 a.m. With minimal traffic to and from the network at such a time, all operating systems were shut down for 10 minutes. IT applied its "patches," which functioned as sets of instructions and updated the firewall to a newer code, to the internet routers.

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Networking, Telecommunications, & Data Center Director William Deigaard compared tricky operating systems to open heart surgery.

"You're fiddling around with something that everyone is using at the same time across campus," he said. "Naturally, there are going to be difficulties."

Student sentiments varied in response to the unplanned outage on Monday night.

"I don't think anyone was annoyed because they couldn't get their work done without the Internet," said Jones College freshman Chloe Blaskiewicz. "Most people just felt weird not being able to check Facebook every 15 minutes. They don't expect the Internet to be so unreliable on a college campus."

"These things happen," said Hanszen College freshman Rebecca Lo. "I was on Skype when the Internet went down, and I was pretty frustrated because I lost my entire conversation. I'm just glad everything is fine now."

Deigaard said the problem was not going to be a concern again in the future.

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