Take away campus internet access for four hours and hordes of students go into a desperate panic.
Wednesday night, Dartmouth students did just that when the campus "border router" was brought down due to excessively high traffic, Director of Computing Services Bob Johnson said. While the router was out of commission, students and faculty on campus could not access the internet or receive non-campus e-mail.
The border router facilitates all the information coming into campus from the outside Internet. With the exchange of too much information, the router can shut down.
To the relief of BlitzMail fiends, the router failure did not bring down the campus e-mail system. BlitzMail does not go through the border router because its messages are intra-campus.
Nonetheless, the Internet failure left many students scratching their heads, and some even feeling stranded.
"I was working on a paper, trying to do some research online," Lauren Gorecki '07 said. "I just finally gave up."
The router crashed because it was overloaded, Johnson said. He blamed the "older-generation" router's "limited CPU" for the difficulties. However, certain applications -- particularly those operating multi-cast video sharing -- prove especially problematic for the router.
The router's crash comes at a time when many students are preparing for finals and term papers.
Currently the College is evaluating options for a replacement router to be purchased in the summer, however until then a short-term solution is on its way to prevent another breakdown.
"Cisco is going to ship us a new border router as a loaner," Johnson said. "It should be here by Monday so the problem should go away for good."
As is protocol to do with all internet outages, Computer Services posted a bulletin on the "Computing " Outages" bulletin to inform students of the problem. Johnson encourages students to check there or call the Help Desk if they experience Internet problems in order to clarify whether it is a general Internet problem or something specific to their computer.
