By Lian Bunny
News Editor
St. Bonaventure University experienced a world without Internet on Wednesday, Feb. 18.
According to Michael Hoffman, associate provost and chief information officer, Technology Services received a report around 7 p.m. that the Internet was down.
By 9:30, Daniel Russo, network services manager, was able to reset and replace some of the equipment. Hoffman said Technology Services thought the problem was fixed, as the Internet connection was restored.
The problem resurfaced Thursday night around 11. Again, Russo was able to temporarily restore the Internet around 12:30 a.m. Friday. Hoffman said once the Internet lost connection on Thursday, Technology Services knew it was a faulty piece of hardware since they had cycled the equipment Wednesday night.
According to Hoffman, a particular piece of equipment, firewall, failed. A firewall system is designed to prevent unauthorized access to or from a private network.
“What the firewall does is that it allows all of your traffic to go out unhindered when you’re pulling down websites and things like that,” Hoffman said. “But if somebody tried to get to your computer from the outside, it would get stopped. Any large organization is going to have one.”
Technology Services believed one of the network cards within the firewall failed.
Hoffman said Technology Services bypassed that card Friday night, which caused brief, 5-minute periods of outage. The repairs did not cost the university.
The Internet malfunction interrupted freshman marketing major Eric Gayle’s schedule.
“Last week it went down after 6 o’clock on Wednesday,” Gayle said. “I was researching for a paper. I like to do all my papers and stuff on Wednesdays, because I only have two classes [on those] days. So it really messed with my schedule in that way, because I had to wait for the Internet to come back on.”
Freshman journalism and mass communication major Juliette Bauer wanted to know what exactly happened to the Internet.
“I thought it was just because of the basketball game and how it gets slow because everyone’s on it,” Bauer said. “But then I got back to my dorm [and] it was still going down and coming back up every few minutes. I’m not exactly sure why. I’ve never seen anything that explains it from anybody, like a student or faculty [member].”
According to Hoffman, the Internet connection has been stable since Friday. He believes Technology Services permanently fixed the problem.
“We’ve been very fortunate to have a very stable Internet connection for a very long time,” Hoffman said. “That being said, problems do happen and all I can say is we work as quickly as we can no matter the day or the time to fix them.”
