Damaged firewall kills Internet campus-wide

This week’s campus-wide Internet outage, which lasted two-and-a-half-days, was caused by failure of the network’s fire wall, and is expected to cost CSC $6,500 for new equipment, said Ann Burk, director of information technology.

Burke said the $6,500 expense will cover the cost of two new fire walls – one to replace the damaged fire wall, the other to serve as a redundant system.

The origins of the outage were traced to Friday, when IT personnel identified power problems in the system’s equipment, Burk said.

The IT Department and the damaged fire wall are housed in Miller Hall. Last week, Chadron firefighters responded to an alarm in that building, and speculated that an overheated motor in a vending machine or something electrical in the storage room caused the alarm. Burk said, that to the best of her knowledge, last week’s incident was unrelated to the Internet outage.

Students awoke to no Internet service Sunday morning, and the outage lasted until late Tuesday morning.

Students’ responses to the outage ranged from annoyance to frustration after they were unable to access popular social networking websites, such as Facebook, or use the Internet for homework.

DeAwna Olson, 18, freshman of Crawford, said she was annoyed with the outage. “Yes, because I can’t access my assignments,” she said. “I was Facebook deprived; but I survived.”

However, some students’ reactions were ambivalent.

“I wasn’t really stressed out,” said Ryan Scott, 21, junior of Mitchell. “The only thing stressful was not getting homework done.”

The repairs were not solely an in-house effort – Network Nebraska, a collaborative organization formed to share telecommunications resources, network services, and applications among eligible participants, helped with the temporary repairs.

The outage did not adversely affect the administration’s ability to make emergency notifications to the campus community. Burk said that the IT Department has the ability to use mass texting to inform students about emergencies in lieu of e-mail.

Campus Internet is now running via back-up hardware, and will be disconnected in the near future when the new fire walls arrive. Burk said that the IT department is still determining the best time to shut down the system and install the new equipment when it arrives.

“We’ll do our best to avoid any interruption to the work of faculty and students,” Burk said.