Complications interrupt USU Web, mail services
Many USU students trying to prepare for finals encountered problems with Aggiemail, Blackboard and the Internet in general Thursday.
This is because three different problems coincidentally happened the same day, one involving a backhoe in Salt Lake City, another involving the university’s Storage Array Network (SAN) and the third involving a power outage, said Kevin Reeve, USU Information Technology’s marketing and communications coordinator.
“It was a triple whammy,” Reeve said.
Around 9 a.m. Thursday, a backhoe on Beck Street in Salt Lake City severed a fiber optic cable, Reeve said. Utah State gets its Internet through the Utah Education Network (UEN). He said the Internet reaches the university through three fiber optic cables. The accident at Beck Street knocked out two of these lines, leaving only one line, the southern-most fiber optic cable, to conduct the Internet for the entire university.
The line still in service has a 1G capacity and was used at up to 90 percent Thursday. It is usually doesn’t receive more than 75 percent usage, and Reeve said this extreme use caused some issues and delays.
“It’s kind of like the freeway; too many cars on the freeway,” he said.
Fixing the fiber optic cable requires splicing the underground cable back together, Reeve said, and it could take a while to complete the process.
Reeve said Information Technology tried to spread the word to students, staff and faculty through phone calls and text messages to use the Internet for research purposes only and as little as possible. Thursday morning before word was spread, about 10 percent of campus Internet use was traceable to YouTube, he said.
Qwest Communications customer service said there is no way to know how long it will take to repair the problem, but that the process has already started.
Aggiemail was down due to a problem with a unit on campus, Reeve said. The SAN started flashing a light indicating it was “sick,” he said. As a preventative measure in order to avoid information loss, the SAN shut down several parts of its network, including Aggiemail’s central authentication system. This same thing happened Wednesday afternoon, he said. The SAN’s vendor sent in people and hardware to fix the problem Wednesday and again Thursday evening.
The day of Internet failures continued Thursday evening when the Eccles Broadcast Center (EBC) experience power failure, Reeve said. The EBC is part of the UEN located in Salt Lake City. This last outage caused USU Internet connection interruptions. It also made logging in to BlackBoard virtually impossible.
Reeve said he still encourages USU members to use the Internet sparingly while these problems are fixed.
–rac.ch@aggiemail.usu.edu