If your wireless connection is still not up to speed, it should be by the end of the week. According to Bruce Carpenter, Director of Technical Support, one of the systems in our authentication process Cisco is broken.
“This is a real strange problem and we don’t know what caused it at this point. It won’t be until it gets fixed that we can define it for certain,” said Carpenter. The Information Technology staff on campus has been on campus late into the night trying to solve the issue, some even staying overnight to work with Cisco engineers.
They do know a few things: for one, the issue has nothing to do with the snow, and likely nothing to do with capacity or bandwidth. It does explain why many students cannot receive wireless on their personal computers and why some computers in the library do not allow users to log on.
“I think there is something broken in one of the systems, perhaps a software malfunction” said Carpenter. “There are three or four different systems that work together. If one goes bad, it impacts the others. We’re thinking at this point that it’s Cisco Clean Access.”
Connecticut College has been using Cisco software for about seven years. Like almost all other colleges and universities, they need a system that keep out the viruses that were before plaguing their technology. Cisco is a process made up of three systems. First is Clean Access, which ensures that a computer has the current operating system and antivirus protection. Next is Active Directory, which checks the username and password to ensure that the user is a member of the College Community. After access is granted, permission is granted to proceed to the desired webpage. There is a final system, one that has also been malfunctioning, that assigns the IP address to each computer.
The IT staff and Cisco have been finding and fixing specific problems as they check each system, which causes other issues along the way; this process is what caused the wired connection to malfunction on Wednesday. Now the wired network should be completely fixed. The wireless network, however, is still being repaired.
“When it started out on Monday, some people could connect to the wireless network and others couldn’t,” said Carpenter. “The difficult part of this is that there wasn’t a logical scheme of who could and who couldn’t connect. For example, there are four switches in the library, and one was not working. There really is no explanation why one of four should go bad.”
The College has hired another engineer for the next few days to help repair the final snags in the wireless connection. Carpenter says that ideally it will be completely fixed by tomorrow.
Although the network issues have been annoying this week, it seems like Information Services has been working pretty hard to get them all fixed. Big ups. Hopefully we end up with a stronger network than before.