Professors pick up chalk when network fails

Internet access in several campus buildings crashed early Thursday morning, preventing use of e-mail, OneStart, OnCourse and IUCAT. In classrooms where computers were needed, students went home early, unable to log in.\nIU's Classroom Technology Services received about a dozen calls from professors inquiring about the outage, said CTS Director Beverly Teach. \n"We had several classrooms affected by it," Teach said. "If you had to use computers in the room for anything, you couldn't."\nFreshman Amber Brothers, who takes a 9:30 a.m. calculus class, said her professor could not access his PowerPoint presentation to share prepared notes with the class. He had to turn to the old-fashioned blackboard, instead.\n"Usually he projects the tables on the screen," she said. "He couldn't do that so he had to write the entire thing out."\nA software upgrade in the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation went awry Thursday morning and sparked the outage, said Mike Lucas, director of IU telecommunications. The upgrade was to the HPER "core switch," which channels Internet access to most campus buildings.\nOnly two switches exist on campus. The other is located at the Wrubel Computing Center at 10th Street and the 45/46 bypass. Buildings connected to Wrubel were not affected.\nThe upgrade was supposed to prevent Ethernet "loops," which occur when data is mistakenly sent to multiple addresses. Ethernet loops slow down Internet access by flooding servers with needless traffic. \nTo restore the network Thursday morning, the planned installation had to be undone. \n"We'll schedule that again at a later point," Lucas said. \nMost maintenance occurs early in the morning when few people use the network. \n"We make network upgrades quite often," Lucas said. "They don't normally have problems."\nThe outage lasted from about 8 to 10 a.m. according to the IU Network and System Notices Web page.\n-- Contact General Assignments Editor Adam VanOsdol at avanosdo@indiana.edu.