Disabled E-Mail Causes Panic

For a community that uses electronic mail so extensively the "crash" of the e-mail server on Dec. 8 was catastrophic to many.

Junior Clara Hatanaka said, "I was in the computer lab in [Mudd] A-level, and I wasn't doing e-mail, but everyone else was, and they all started cursing when the server went down."

A server is a specific computer that carries data for a particular action, like handling e-mail, storing files in student lockers or housing a collection of application software.

Director of information technology John Bucher pointed out the generality of the phrase "crash." "To maybe 99.9 percent of the people, when what they want to work isn't working, it's 'crashing.'"

Servers going down are due to both hardware and software problems. The e-mail server is a single computer on campus dedicated to storing and moving all the campus e-mail. A frequent dilemma with the e-mail server is the large mass of information it handles. This can cause the server to break down, not allowing anyone to access, read or write e-mail.

In order to safeguard the computers that handle massive e-mail data, some large providers, like Hotmail and AOL, employ backup servers in case their primary computer fails.

According to Bucher, Oberlin doesn't need a back-up server. "It's not reasonable for Oberlin College to have that. We would pay so much money and have nothing to show for it."

Bucher explained that no server is guaranteed to function all the time. "With any server, you're going to have a problem from time to time. Any e-mail server goes down at some time. It might go down here for two hours, and people scream. They don't remember that it hasn't gone down for the last year."

The College's web access has also been notably slow this semester. The bandwidth at a given college determines the speed at which information travels from one internet destination to another. Information traveling through a web connection can be thought of as water flowing through a pipe. The amount of bandwidth can be thought of as the diameter of the pipe. A larger bandwidth is like a wider pipe, which allows more flow, thus a large bandwidth means everything is faster.

As of now, the College is limited to a bandwidth of 4.5 megabytes per second. When the line to the internet is too full with information, all internet activity slows down, which accounts for this semester's internet connection speed.

Bucher said, "Our access to the internet has been very very slow this semester. There's been a huge increase in usage. We added 50 percent more access. It seems like every first-year showed up with a computer. There're more people doing more things, more of the time."

Next semester, the College intends to increase its bandwidth to 12 megabytes per second. This will cost $120,000 per year, almost $70,000 more than what the College pays now.

Last year around this time the bandwidth was only at 3.0 megabytes per second, costing $30,000 per year. But a year ago it was considered fast.

Bucher said, "We were ahead of the curve. We had more bandwidth than most liberal arts colleges our size. That was a year ago. Now, a lot of [those other colleges] have added more bandwidth. But we'll get ahead again on Feb. 1."

Bucher is still worried that the larger bandwidth might not be enough. "People are downloading audio files, video files, using their computers as radios, streaming broadcasts. It used to be that you'd go and get some encyclopedia article, now they're doing everything. It's exhilarating, but it's also frustrating."

Help desk consultant and sophomore Ian Bergman said that the Computing Center works hard to resolve problems like downed servers. "It's almost a panic for us consultants, I'd say, because people depend so much on e-mail, especially this close to the end of the semester. We certainly work as hard as we can to get it back up as soon as possible."

Bucher said, "At the busy time of the semester it's not uncommon to have several problems that we have to constantly watch. From the middle of November through finals we have to stay on these problems."

Bergman said, "Be patient, we're working on it. We're doing the best we can do."