OIT analyzes network errors

Over the summer, OIT transitioned to a printing system that allowed users to print to any networked printer on campus. At the beginning of the school year, however, many users reported to OIT that they could not connect to the new system. And two months ago, a University-wide outage knocked out wireless Internet service on campus for more than nine hours.

Steven Sather, director of support services for OIT, said OIT has conducted reviews of both problems and has adopted more regular monitoring of both systems.

Matt Marder ’13 said he grew frustrated trying to connect his personal computer to the “All Clusters” print queue earlier this year and resorted to printing all his documents directly to a printer in Forbes College from the residential college’s computer cluster.

“I gave up trying to connect to other printers after a couple tries,” Marder said. “I just stick to the printers in Forbes.”

“Testing of the system over the summer did not reveal the problems experienced at the start of the academic year,” Sather explained in an e-mail. “The problems surfaced when we went from hundreds of people using the system in the summer to thousands of people using it during the school year.”

To investigate the problem, Sather said, OIT “tracked individual print requests through the system to see where they got stuck.”

Dinora Llamas ’12, who lives in Scully Hall, noted, “The printer in my building hasn’t been working for a couple weeks.”

“It’s been slightly irritating,” Llamas added. “I’ve had to go to places like Firestone to print what I needed.”

Sather said that while printing complaints have been less common in recent weeks, current problems may not be due to the implementation of the new system.

“Now most times people are having problems printing, the problem can be traced back to the computer used to print from and not an underlying printing infrastructure problem,” Sather explained.

Sather also oversaw the investigation into the wireless Internet outage, which according to the OIT website occurred Sept. 22 at 3:27 p.m., and was resolved by 1:44 a.m. the following day.

“It was frustrating for a few hours because I couldn’t do my homework,” Marder said of the outage. “These things happen, I guess.”

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“We examined what was happening on a micro, not macro, level,” Sather explained. “We closely watched the network and determined the sorts of data traffic that was causing congestion.”

While OIT technicians did not find conclusive proof, Sather said, “We believe we now understand the causes of both the printing and the wireless problems experienced earlier this semester.”

Moving forward, Sather added, OIT has implemented “some additional enhancements ... over fall break which should improve the speed and reliability of wireless,” which includes a filter to limit the type of “background noise” traffic that had been clogging the system.