Students who have had difficulty accessing their PAWS accounts at night are not alone.
Some students have been violating the bandwidth usage policy through excessive downloads, which slows the server down and restricts usage.
“We keep adding more and more bandwidth, but we are at full capacity,” said Ron Hay, Computing Services chief information officer. “We are concerned, because we are already seeing slow access, which prevents students from performing routine activities.”
Computing Services charts all bandwidth usage data on detailed logs, allowing the office to correct problems, according to Charlie McMahon, Computing Services assistant director.
“My general impression of the delays comes from higher student usage after class hours,” said John Borné, assistant director of enterprise solutions. “Students download files, which slows down the system.”
Problems incurred on campus are easy to find and fix. Off-campus problems are harder to detect, because they use commercial servers and can be attributed to a number of sources.
However, these problems often are localized, leaving some areas unaffected.
The office noticed a slowdown Monday night, which they tracked to the telecommunications division.
Computing Services put a message on the main PAWS page to warn students of the possible difficulty they may encounter while retrieving e-mail, Hay said.
“My mail was out for a little while on Monday, but I work with a dial up, so it is slow to begin with,” said Brandon Eastep, political science junior. “It was not really a problem because I saw the warning.”
Computing Services could understand better how to fix problems if students specified in their complaints which specific application within PAWS is malfunctioning or if PAWS is completely inaccessible, as well as the time and location the problem occurred, said Robin Ethridge, Enterprise Solutions manager.
Students checking their e-mail accounts recently also may have noticed the standard gray logon box has been replaced with a colorful one.
Computing Services changed the logon box to increase security, Ethridge said. The new logon connects directly to the Computing Services’ server, instead of Internet browsers.
Computing Services is working on replacing the close window option eventually, which shuts down the entire browser, with a logout function.
Students have mixed reactions to the new dialog box.
“I don’t like [the new logon] because it doesn’t save my password,” said Darren Gaunt, electrical engineering sophomore.
However, the new login system will not prevent browsers from displaying the dialog box, giving the option to retain password and username information. The password retention option depends on specific computer and browser application detectors, said Mike Smith, enterprise integration manager.
“It annoys me,” said Bryan Slauson, human resources senior. “It’s a logon; it doesn’t need to be so flashy.”
Hay said if students do not like the new form, it can be changed because students are their customers.
“We make cosmetic design changes for customer satisfaction,” Hay said. “We’re trying to make the application cleaner and more professional, but if it is not doing that, we need to look into it. We cannot afford customer dissatisfaction.”
Contact Melissa Prescott at [email protected]