Internet service fails again
By JASON McFARLEY
News Editor
An outage that barred Notre Dame Internet users from accessing Web sites outside the campus network remained in effect early this morning, marking at least the fourth server failure this academic year.
Administrators in the Office of Information Technologies said Tuesday night that they were unsure of the cause for the disruption and were unclear about when the problem would be resolved.
Computer operator Brandon Bauer, who was working to fix the failure Tuesday, said the problem was likely linked with a downed router at Genuity, the University's Chicago-based service provider.
"We don't have a specific cause yet; the router that's down in Chicago carries our service," Bauer said.
The outage began around 9:30 p.m. and prevented users from accessing Web pages outside the nd.edu domain and sending e-mail to anyone outside the University community.
"The local campus network is fine, but if you try to contact a Web site past campus, you're not going to get anything," Bauer said.
Genuity officials said Tuesday they were still trouble-shooting but it would not take long to restore the router, according to Bauer.
Tuesday's interruption in service was the fourth in a string of Internet outages dating back to the beginning of the academic year.
On Sept. 12, an extended outage of the University's e-mail server brought campus online communications to a standstill for nearly a full day.
On Nov. 6 and 7, a 36-hour failure posed problems similar to the Tuesday outage.
Scattered outages — both scheduled and unexpected —have also disrupted campus Internet access throughout the year.
Most recently, a planned outage of the University's Webmail server shut down e-mail usage on March 11 and 12. Bauer said that event was unrelated to Tuesday's outage.
All News Stories for Wednesday, March 21, 2001
