The Gold Coast residence cluster was completely cut off from computer network services for most of Sunday evening and part of Monday morning as a result of two separate hardware malfunctions.
Officials from Kiewit Computation Center said they were not sure when Sunday evening the problem occurred. The system was fully functioning again by about 10:30 a.m. yesterday morning.
While the network connection was down, residents of the Gold Coast -- consisting of Gile, Lord and Streeter residence halls -- were unable to access any computer programs that required an active connection to the network, including BlitzMail, DCIS Navigator, Netscape Navigator, the Online Library and any Keyserved application programs.
The broken connection to the network also prevented students from printing documents at any of the campus' public printers.
This is the second instance in two weeks of an entire residence cluster losing access to the computer network over a sustained period of time.
Two weekends ago, a hardware malfunction shut down the network at Channing Cox and Maxwell residence halls for more than 48 hours. That problem was attributed to a foul-up in the central processing unit at the River Apartments.
Taylor said the network failure that occurred this weekend at the Gold Coast was initially caused by a network router in Silsby Hall that malfunctioned.
A router is a computer that acts like a "traffic cop" on a network, Taylor said. It sorts through the packets of computer data coming in on various wires and redirects that data to the appropriate destination or destinations.
The entire Gold Coast is connected to Kiewit through that router in Silsby, Taylor said. If the Silsby connection goes down, any buildings relying on it lose their network services as well.
The router in Silsby was having a hardware problem that caused it to crash repeatedly, Taylor said, and this caused traffic from the Gold Coast to be continually blocked.
The Silsby routing computer was repaired yesterday by 8:30 a.m., Taylor said.
But one hour later, a different router located in Gile -- which feeds network data from Silsby to the Gold Coast cluster -- malfunctioned, Taylor said.
The Gile router was down for no longer than two hours and once it had its processor unit replaced -- by 10:30 a.m. yesterday morning -- the network was again reported fully functioning.
The two hardware failures at the Gold Coast this past weekend both needed to be repaired by a trained technician, according to Kiewit Director of Technical Services Punch Taylor.
Taylor said the network problems this summer are part of standard minor network difficulties and not indicative of any problem.
"This is not an unusual number of network downs," Taylor said. "We have got a big network here approaching 100 routers. Something is happening somewhere every day."
Taylor said that in addition to their regular duties of dealing with network difficulties, Kiewit's network crews will be working especially hard over the next few weeks to get the 13 residence halls recently upgraded to the Ethernet network on-line.
Students said that the amount of time the network was disconnected was irritating.
"It was really inconvenient because I was working on a paper and I wanted to print a draft," Melanie Gustin '97 said.
Gustin said that she expected Kiewit to effect repairs quickly because the network was disconnected for a long time.
"It went down early in the evening like around 10 p.m.," she said. "I felt I should have called Kiewit but I didn't because I expected that they would be swamped with irritated phone calls."
"It was more of an inconvenience than anything else," Gustin added.
The loss of BlitzMail was a major annoyance, Timothy Farrell '98 said.
"We are all dependent on BlitzMail so I just use the public terminals instead," he said.
Farrell also said the network was down for an unusually long period of time.
"It started last night around 9:30 and extended through most of the night," he said. "It was until at least 10 in the morning, would be my guess."
