The internet provides a window of opportunities for people to learn, communicate or entertain, and for students it can make or break their ability to participate in class.
When the network does not work, it can create a number of issues for students both on and off campus.
Last Thursday, September 10, the on-campus network at Keene State College was unavailable for students, faculty and staff, posing a number of problems for day-to-day campus life.
Chief Information Officer of Information Technology, Laura Seraichick said that the outage lasted for about 12 hours from around four in the morning until four in the afternoon.
“There was an extensive outage, meaning that it was any kind of information coming in or out. Our network was basically down,” Seraichick said.
Without access to the Internet, a number of students were unable to hand in their assignments on time.
First-year KSC student Pete Dubois was among these students. He said that his professors were understanding of the situation. “My teachers made accommodations because they realized that it was a school-wide issue,” Dubois said.
On the other hand, KSC sophomore Melissa Munoz said that she had a more difficult time getting her assignments in.
“I had to submit a paper by a certain time, and I was just about to hit send but it said my Wifi was not connected and then
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I couldn’t submit it,” Munoz said. She continued, “[My professor] told us we could hand it in late, but then it still wasn’t working so I had to send it in super late and I got points taken off. I felt like I was really behind and I couldn’t do anything, and I felt kind of stuck because I couldn’t do my homework.”
Seraichick said that the cause of the outage is still undetermined.
“Networks are complicated, they’re not one piece of equipment, they’re probably fifteen all in line and they’re all sort of connected and any of those can have something wrong with it and that can then impact it,” Seraichick said.
Seraichick also said that a part of the problem is that the piece of equipment that was not working did not indicate that there was anything wrong with it.
“We did have failure in a piece of equipment that wasn’t actually reporting failure so the vendor engineers are going to take that piece of equipment and do some forensics on it to see what caused it to fail and why it wasn’t reporting that it was failing,” Seraichick said.
According to a number of students, it is rumored that the Science Center building was struck by lightning in an electrical storm, resulting in the outage.
“That’s speculation, there was a big electrical storm that night, but there was a piece of HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning), which is not in our network equipment, which did have something that melted from something kind of like that,” Seraichick said in regards to the rumor.
After the long day without any Internet access on campus, Seraichick said they were finally able to get it back up and running later that afternoon.
“We had both our internal engineers and our external engineers, pulled in our peers up at UNH so we could have lots of sets of eyes on the problem,” Seraichick said. At this point, students are still facing issues with their internet connections on campus, preventing them from using it the way that they are used to be able to do, mainly that the Internet has been very slow.
First-year student Dan Dubicki said that his major requires him to be able to access the Internet. “I’m a computer science major and everything that I do is on the Internet. I back up files, I have a web design class, I have other servers that I run,” Dubicki said.
“It’s been a problem I’ve faced because my phone is actually broken right now so it’s the only way I can communicate with people is through the internet on my computer so it’s been a nuisance to try and handle that,” first-year student Dubois said.
Dubois said that he feels that the school will do its part to fix any issues for students. “I have trust that the school will work those kinks out, I mean it is just the beginning of the year,” Dubois said.
Seraichick said that she and her team monitor YikYak in order to see how students are feeling about the Internet and to do what they can to fix any issues that might come up.
She said that there were about ten to 12 thousand connections on campus, and of these there were bound to be one or two issues, and that the number of devices connected to the network at a given time can often cause these issues.
“We see a number of it has to do with devices, we all have a ton of them and they constantly change and get updates all the time, and that lots of times throws things off,” Seraichick said.
Seraichick said that she encourages any students experiencing problems with the wireless network to visit the IT help desk, located in the Elliot center.
Devon can be contacted at droberts@kscequinox.com
