A failed piece of hardware disrupted Internet service on campus for about two hours Tuesday morning, causing problems for faculty, staff and students alike.
According to Matt Valenzisi, lead network architect for ComTech, the outage was a result of a failed router in the main distribution frame on Centennial Campus. The problem also prevented off-campus users from accessing sites like Webmail and the University’s Web site from about 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.
“Basically, the router that stands between us and the rest of the world was nonfunctional,” Valenzisi said.
Although crews from ComTech went to Centennial to identify the problem initially, Valenzisi said, they turned the problem over to the University’s Internet Service Provider, MCNC, to repair the problem.
“Almost instantly, when we realized we had an issue, they were calling us and telling us we had an issue,” he said.
Valenzisi said he didn’t think the two-hour lapse in service was unreasonable, but he did point out that it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily acceptable.
“From our perspective, we’re always disappointed when there’s an outage that lasts more than a minute, or even an outage at all,” he said. “But you’re going to have outages.”
But for students like Jonathan Lee, a junior in chemical engineering and chemistry, even two hours was too long. He said he was trying to resubmit a Webassign close to his 9 a.m. deadline and was unable to turn the assignment in.
“When I pay so much for an education, I expect it to be reliable,” Lee said. “It disappointed me and it disappointed my professors.”
Faculty members also had problems.
Ifran Okay, a doctoral student in mathematics, cancelled his morning session of computational mathematics, which requires Internet access for classwork. He said that although it was frustrating, it was a relatively minor inconvenience.
“Hopefully it’s not going to repeat,” he said.
But despite the problems the failure caused for certain portions of campus, the fact that the outage took place in the morning meant some students weren’t affected at all.
“I was asleep,” Alex Daidone, a freshman in computer engineering said.
The failure occurred in the router’s supervisor engine, which Valenzisi said serves as the “switch’s brain.” This piece is generally one of the most expensive components of the router, costing about $25,000 to $35,000.
“That’s where the magic happens,” he said.
He added that the maintenance costs are the responsibility of MCNC and will not cost the University.
Valenzisi said campus has only one of these routers and its level of sophistication is “orders of magnitude larger than what you’d find at your apartment.”
ComTech staff does plan to add another device for redundancy around the end of the fiscal year, which may prevent a similar problem in the future.
The routers however, cost about $100,000 apiece.
“It’s very expensive,” he said. “Engineers can engineer as much redundancy as you tell them to, but someone has to pay for that.”
But as an out-of-state student, Lee said he feels he already pays enough. He said that despite the fact the outage only lasted for two hours, most students rely heavily on the Internet.
It’s a dependency he said is a good thing.
“I can’t really blame it on the people in the culture, I blame it on the people in control,” Lee said.