You may not know this but October 30 is known as Mischief night.  It is a custom where you take a degree of licence to play pranks and do mischief.  Well, that is what happened to our email system last night.

 

At approximately 4:20 p.m. yesterday the email system went into an ABEND (Abnormal end of task) state.  That meant that you could not log into the email system.  ITS got the email system up so that you could log into it by 5 p.m. but the problem was not solved.  From 9:30 p.m. until 10:30 p.m. the email system was like a yo-yo; up and down.  After that we were able to stabilize the email system.

 

Long story short, we know what caused the crash (problems with authentication) but we do not know why.  No email was lost.

 

When ITS originally set up the campus wireless network we had 256 IP addresses (a numerical identification that is assigned to a device that is using a computer network for communication between servers).  That number served us well since people were on and off the wireless network constantly.  Since then we have seen a dramatic shift in the type and number of computers that our students own.  More students own laptops rather than desktops.  And, laptops are being increasingly used in general. Further ITS is continually adding more wireless hot spots.  Our 256 IP addresses no longer served us well .  We have corrected that problem by adding additional IP addressees for wireless use and have made wireless access more reliable.  This sounds simple, but to implement it was extremely time consuming and took over a month to accomplish.

 

An interesting question: If you have a choice between wired and wireless access which would you choose?  Most people would say wireless, but in fact, on a college campus you are better off using wired access because you get faster service and are guaranteed that all updates to software including operating systems are current.  With wireless access you share the bandwidth with all the users on the wireless network at that time; in essence you never know how fast your access will be.  With wired access you are guaranteed a minimum amount of bandwidth no matter how many people are on the network.

 

Who is Archie Griffin? Who is Nate Thurmond? What is KE (15) 778?  What is Arch15Nate?

 

Archie Griffin is a running back who played football for The Ohio State Buckeyes.  He is college football's only two-time Heisman trophy winner and a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.  More importantly, he was in my mathematics class when he was a freshman at The Ohio State University .  I'm a true Buckeye so I have a picture of Arch and me on my cell phone.

 

Nate Thurmond is an All-Star basketball center and a member of the NBA Hall of Fame.  He played for the Chicago Bulls but mainly played for Philadelphia.  In his debut for the Bulls he recorded a quadruple-double and became the first player in NBA history to do so.  More importantly, he was my Anatomy and Physiology lab partner at Bowling Green State University.

 

KE (15) 778 is a telephone number.  In the dark ages before technology,  telephone numbers were typically named with a name whose first two letters translated to the digits of the exchange's prefix on a common telephone dial.  Therefore KE (15) 778 was KEnmore (15) 778.  This was my parent's first telephone number and as a child I had to memorize it so in case I got lost the police could call my parents and let them know where I was. 

 

Arch15Nate is a good password that is easy to remember.  It is made up of two words and a number that have meaning for me; the number should be between the words.