Access speed upsets students
By Laura Pelner
Campus
Editor
Purdue students who live in the University Residences,
and those who live off campus and use Purdue servers to access the Internet,
have had trouble getting online in the last two weeks.
"It started when we got back from break; the connection
is getting slower and slower," said Kalen Cartwright, a freshman in
the School of Technology. "It got to the point where we couldn't connect
to any outside web pages — anything off the Purdue server, it would
not load it would just time out. At home we use a 56K modem and we considered
plugging that in to our (computer and) phone here because it would be
faster."
A lot of students have had similar complaints.
Steve Barg, a part-time student and a staff applications developer for
Purdue, said he tried to download a demo of the program Diablo II and
waited a long time.
"I sat there for 10 minutes waiting for it to transfer,"
said Barg. "Normally something like this would take me two to three
minutes to download. But now I could sit there for 10 minutes before
it would even ask where to save it and then start downloading."
Barg added that checking his e-mail through Hotmail
is hard too. "I'll be sitting there for five minutes before the page
is loaded up," said Barg.
Cartwright and Barg both said they've tried to
contact the people in charge of Purdue's Residence Network (RESNET)
and Purdue's computing center but got minimal responses.
This is probably because explanations thus far
have been limited. They have been issued an official statement to release
regarding the problem — "We are aware of the problem and are working
on it."
Scott Ksander, the associate director of the computing
center, wrote that statement. "We're in the process of investigating
and trying some things. We're working on it as we speak and have been
all week," said Ksander.
He added that despite the theories students have
regarding the cause of the problem — that Purdue has shifted some
of the traffic going through its servers and caused an overload —
the computing center has no evidence to back that up.
"The problem is an increased traffic load," said
Ksander. "The increased load started at the end of Thanksgiving break,
but because of finals and winter break it was not as visible as it has
been since school started."
Furthermore, Ksander said, there is absolutely
no data to support that any change or reorganization is involved in
the problem. "We did do some reconfiguration over break, but, like I
said, the data shows this phenomenon going back to the end of November.
There is no data to support (the reconfiguration and problems) are related."
One Purdue student, Geoffrey Grover, a freshman
in the School of Technology and a self proclaimed computer geek, said,
"Recently the Purdue Data Network division of the computing center began
forcing all RESNET Internet traffic through one high-speed network connection.
Unfortunately, this connection cannot handle the amount of data being
sent and received," said Grover. "Purdue keeps telling me that my computer
is the problem but as a computer technology major and computer geek
I know better."
Ksander said that at one point he saw about 100
emails from students regarding this problem. "It's a very interesting
and complicated problem. As with most things in technology, we have
to investigate and understand it before we can fix it and that's what
we're in the middle of."
Purdue President Martin Jischke repeated the formal
statement and supported the computing center team. "I know they are
hard at work trying to solve the problem," said Jischke.
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