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Baylor U.: Baylor U. Internet outage linked to Dallas(U-Wire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) By Farah Damani, The Lariat (Baylor U.) WACO, Texas -- All clicking and typing came to a hault for two and half hours on Monday when an extended Internet outage occurred, according to networking technicians. "We don't like being out that long," said Carl Flynn, director of marketing and communications for Information Technology and University Libraries. "If it's only for five minutes, everybody understands that." Information Technology Services detected the Internet connection failure at 12:42 p.m. Local services, such as e-mail between Baylor University e-mail addresses, university Web sites and Blackboard were not affected by the outage, but all external e-mail and Web communications were unavailable for the duration of the outage. "As long as you stayed within the Baylor network and Web sites it was okay, but sending e-mails outside of the Baylor network didn't work," Flynn said. Bob Hartland, director of security, networking systems and ITS, explained that several systems throughout Baylor's campus were able to detect the Internet outage. Once detected, ITS staff performed a trace route from the electronics on campus in order to show where there was connectivity. Staff discovered that the problem wasn't with campus connectivity, but connectivity coming from elsewhere. "Once we realized the problem was not on campus, we traced the route up to Dallas," Hartland said. He explained that the issue was with the Internet service provider and that there was a bad connection in the port of the router connected to campus. Having determined that the issue did not occur because of equipment failure at Baylor University, the network administrator contacted technicians at Qwest Global, Baylor's Internet service provider, to report the issue. Internet service provider because we knew the outage wasn't a local problem," Flynn said. Baylor students and faculty were informed about the outage through the library Web site. "Our protocol was to not e-mail students and alarm them. We would e-mail them if we knew the outage was long term, but in this case we had no idea," Flynn said. With the Internet down, students in class became frustrated when they could not continue with their scheduled assignments. "Our professor posts video for organic chemistry lab online, and since we couldn't watch it, no one in our class knew what we were doing," said Sugar Land junior Rakhi Wadera. "It wasn't the greatest way to start out a Monday afternoon." After evaluating the issue on their end, Qwest technicians responded to report that the outage was caused by a failed piece of equipment in Dallas. The press release stated that the equipment was quickly replaced and the Internet connection was restored to the campus by 3:15 p.m. By 3:30 p.m., all Internet service was restored to faculty, staff and students on campus. ##30## ((Distributed on bahalf of U-Wire via M2 Communications Ltd - http://www.m2.com)) ((U-Wire - http://www.uwire.com)) Copyright ? 2009 U-Wire |