September 15, 2011 | VOL. XCIII ISS. IV
Humping the camera and tandem bikes SINCE 1918
UBC DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW about its Investments, what it’s selling out, it’s research to, or how they are handling your public property. More on P6
U TOP REACH FOR THE
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WIRELESS
More and more athletes are supplementing their work outs with yoga
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CLIFF Emergency crews called to Wreck Beach
P3 Andrew Bates Senior Web Writer
You may be forced to take a midday break from Facebook, as technicians at UBC Information Technology are scrambling due to load issues that have brought the “ubcsecure” wireless internet network to its knees. On September 12, the network’s authentication system started to hit peak load levels due to everyone trying to log in at once, according to an email from IT Client Services. “Some users were able to connect, but most experienced difficulty,” wrote Jennifer Burns, IT’s director of client services. The problem was compounded when people rushed from the network to its sibling, “ubcvisitor,” which is set up for visitors to campus. “Unlike the higher capacity ‘ubcsecure,’ this network can only handle 4000 users and thus became unusable to people without a connection,” the email said.
Load balancing actions kicked in that night, but the authentication system collapsed again at 11am on Tuesday. That afternoon, IT was able to increase the capacity of “ubcvisitor” to accommodate students who were overflowing from the secure network. The current plan is to add authentication servers, which will hopefully ease the bottleneck-causing issues like the network repeatedly asking for campus-wide login user info. “My hope is that in the next 48 hours we’ll have the additional servers online, and that will enable us to reduce that load issue quite substantially,” Burns said. “We should be back to normal.” In the summer, “ubcsecure” became the main wireless network on campus, after the less secure “ubc” network was decommissioned. The secure network also saw its security encryption changed from the WPA1 protocol to the WPA2 protocol, but the security change did not likely contribute to the
outages, according to Burns. Some students have been frustrated as their internet access has ground to a halt. “I’m usually in the computer science building, ICICS, and it’s been trouble logging onto “ubcsecure” down there fairly often. Sometimes it just doesn’t log on, sometimes it takes a long time,” said fourth-year student Laura Abresch. “I’m a computer science student, and I need to be on the internet.” Others were able to push through, and haven’t been too inconvenienced. “I dunno, whatever ten minutes is worth to people, I guess?” said Stuart Cowan, a third-year history student. “For me, it wasn’t a big deal because I have long breaks and I’m patient.” Burns asserted that IT Services was taking the issue seriously. “We know this is disruptive to the students, and we’re definitely doing everything we can to get this back,” she said. “I’m quite confident that in the next day or so, we’ll be back to normal.” U