Network services went down campus-wide yesterday evening, cutting off BlitzMail and Internet access to Dartmouth users, causing significant disruptions among students. The reasons for the outage, which began at about 7 p.m., were still unknown when The Dartmouth went to press at 1:30 a.m.
Intermittant restoration of service was being reported across campus early this morning, but Computer Services staff were unsure of the root cause for what one person working to solve the problem called a network "meltdown."
"It could be anything from a hardware problem to someone issuing traffic that's overwhelming the backbone," said Director of Technical Services Punch Taylor, who had been called in from home to work on the problem. "It looks like there may be more than one problem. The network is not stable."
"Some device out there that we haven't figured out yet may be malfunctioning and doing this," Taylor said at 1:15 a.m. Although he could not predict exactly when the network would be working again, he said he was "reasonably comfortable, but not certain" that the network would be fully functional by morning.
"If it's not up by tomorrow morning, that would be extremely bad," Director of Computing Services Larry Levine earlier in the evening.
Computing Services has a number of tools to work on network problems, Taylor said, including a proprietary program called Intermapper.
"The problem is, when the network is either broken or heavily congested like it is now, then those tools just don't work very well.
"It's good for most network failures, but for this one it's lacking," he said, adding, "We're going to have to dig deep into our tool bag for this one."
Levine noted that problems of this magnitude are unusual at Dartmouth.
"It's rare that something this major happens," Levine said. He was initially unaware that the network was not functioning, but looked into the problem after being contacted by The Dartmouth.
Initially, a router that had lost its powersupply was suspected as a cause of the problem. However, that piece of hardware was quickly fixed but did not restore network function.
Routers for complicated systems like that, maintained by Dartmouth to provide Internet and email services to students, faculty and staff, are central pieces of equipment, Levine said, and their failure can be a serious problem for the network.
Levine noted that Computing Services is continuing to evolve as computers and the Dartmouth network become more and more interwoven with campus life.
"The network in the last few years has become increasingly important," Levine said. "The running of the institution depends more and more on 7 by 24 computing and network services, and we're trying to ramp up to that."
A senior programmer with Computing Services, Stephen Campbell, was also called in to assist Taylor.
