A Host of Internet Snafus Stall Students’ Studies During Midterm Week

Mar 03 2009, Written by Julia Love in Breaking News,News, 1 Comments

At the peak of midterm season, problems with a storage array sidelined wireless Internet access and kept students from accessing Duke Web sites Tuesday evening.

Technological assistants are typically on call in Perkins at the OIT Help Desk until midnight. But due to Tuesday’s snow, no employees were present to assist students with the glitches.

OIT officials could not immediately be reached for comment, but a voicemail recording on the organization’s hotline shed light on the problem:

“We are experiencing problems with one of Duke’s storage arrays. We are working with the vendor, and this has been escalated as a highest severity issue. We suspect a hardware problem and the vendor has parts on standby. We are working to maintain critical services such as web and other services with significant impact. Currents and services that appear to be affected include DHCP, which affects wireless services, web services including the Duke homepage and other Duke sites, Duke Wiki [and] U Portal. There may be other services affected as well. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve these issues.”

The automated message then instructed callers to visit OIT’s Web site for further assistance with their technological dilemmas—but the site was down for the evening.

Visitors to www.duke.edu were instructed to call the Weather Information Line at 919-684-INFO.

Fortunately, The Chronicle’s Web site has weathered the storm. Pick up tomorrow’s paper or check back with www.dukechronicle.com for more on this story.