Network and Internet issues

By Becca Sandager
Cardinal Staff

Two different network/Internet issues occurred on campus during the month of September and into the beginning of October, according to Sarah Bearbower, the information technology manager of academic systems.
Read more...

The first issue plagued all university servers, WebMail, Blackboard, Tegrity and Rex2, which deals with printing, the G drive, departmental file storage and course materials for the Winona campus. This resulted in everything being slowed down, and Bearbower asserts the cause of this slowdown was due to the university’s storage area network (SAN) experiencing a high rate of “network packet retries.”

Essentially, SAN connects and transports storage data between devices in the form of packets. For example, every Web page that you receive comes in a series of packets, and every email you send leaves as a series of packets. In this case, Information Technology (iT) staff and network engineers found a communication error between devices, so the packets had to retry transporting the data, slowing everything down.

Unfortunately, fixing the issue was complicated by the fact that other systems needed to be ruled out as a cause of the problem first. The first steps Bearbower and other iT staff took were to remove a device on the network that assists with spam blocking for the email server and then replace and downgrade the email server. It took time to determine if the slowness would be resolved. After working diligently to troubleshoot the issue, a switch upgrade and SAN network simplification was found to resolve the issue.

The second issue affected the university’s Internet service, which was slow during the first weekend of October. This problem arose when a change was made to move the disaster recovery location to the Saint Teresa campus. The disaster recovery location protects data by replicating it to an off-site location in order to limit data loss and aid data recovery. In order to move the disaster recovery location, Saint Mary’s University Internet service provider, Hiawatha Broadband Connections (HBC), became involved. The problem was resolved when HBC found and fixed a faulty routing table.

During this whole process, the HelpDesk was taking calls from concerned users. Bearbower said, “Through this process we learned of network troubleshooting tools that we are currently training additional professional staff to use. As you can see, networking issues are complicated and hard to explain. We encourage anyone who wants more technical detail to get in touch with the iT department through the Helpdesk.”

The HelpDesk is open Monday through Thursday from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., Friday from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. It can also be reached at ext. 7800, helpdesk@smumn.edu or http://www2.smumn.edu/helpdesk.