Bradley has spent more than $40,000 this academic year on increasing the Internet bandwidth to support campus’ needs, but new problems have begun to arise surrounding server connectivity.
In the past, campus didn’t have enough bandwidth to support students’ usage, but the Information Resources and Technology (IRT) Department received funding from the university right before the spring semester to add more.
“Around winter break, we did a study with our Internet provider to take the limits off our bandwidth to see how much we actually would use if we didn’t have a limit,” Sandra Bury, interim associate provost for IRT, said. “They recommended we would need 300 additional Mb [megabits] … and we got approval right away to add 300 more, so the total this academic year that we’ve added is 429 Mb [megabits], so this takes us up to a total of 1.5 Gb [gigabits].”
The IRT Department was also able to purchase a net equalizer, which is a bandwidth management device.
“All of the traffic flows through this device, and basically if it hits a certain threshold … we take the top users of bandwidth and it puts them in a brief quarantine, or time out, to let traffic continue to flow. It takes the people using the most and moves them out of the picture.”
Although Bury believes the bandwidth problems have been remedied, the IRT Department is now facing issues with its servers.
“We’ve been having some issues that appear to be load related,” Bury said. “We have to restart them and do trouble shooting, and we are adding more memory, but we don’t know what’s causing [the problems].”
Bury said the IRT Department includes a staff that is good at finding problems and can usually fix things in a day or two, but the server issue is more elusive.
“We are limping along a bit because we have a problem, and then we fix it, and we are good for a while, but then we have another problem … so, in the meantime, we are trying to reduce the load,” Bury said.
It appears the servers get overwhelmed and can’t handle large amounts of Internet traffic, according to Bury. To fix this, the IRT Department would need to upgrade the servers, and in the process, shut them down for a day.
“It would be a several-hours outage during that time, so we don’t want to do that until spring break,” Bury said.
Bury said she thinks the timing of the server problems is unfortunate because she wanted to know for certain the new bandwidth is working.
“One of the things I’m a little discouraged about is I have a survey to send out to students,” Bury said. “I wanted to send it after we added this additional 300 Mb of bandwidth, but right at the time we added the bandwidth, we had these server problems.”
Jon Weber, a senior mechanical engineering major, said he has had recent issues connecting to websites.
“Just today, I had to work on two lab reports and research, but BU Secure wouldn’t connect me,” Weber said. “This is a university that works on Sakai, which is an online resource. How am I supposed to utilize that without the Internet?”
Bury said she thinks students now wrongly believe their connectivity problems are about the campus bandwidth.
“It could look the same when web browsing and you can’t get somewhere, you could think, ‘Oh gosh, the Internet,’ but it’s that the server can’t translate and get you there,” Bury said.
