Due to multiple Internet and e-mail problems this semester many students and faculty members have became frustrated at their inability to access online content, much of which is essential to course work.
Dr. Dan Brown, a mass communications professor who relies heavily on the Internet for some of his classes, has had to cancel assignments and change deadlines.
“Students have become gun shy, because of what we have been through in the past,” he said.
Brown has been receiving more requests than usual for assistance from students who turn in assignments over the Internet.
E-mail has also been effected.
“TNII (Tennessee Infor-mation Infrastructure) has caused some problems,” said Alan Baldwin of the Office of Information Technology during a forum on Wednesday.
Tom Hopkins, OIT executive director said, “TNII goes down 10 to 20 times a day, most last 30 seconds to one minute – some as much as 14 hours.”
Since the beginning of September, these outages have resulted in about 94 percent availability, according to a TNII executive summary.
This fall, ETSU has more than 400 course sections with on-line components, which affects more than 6,000 students.
It is not just outages in our service that have been causing problems, part of the problem is internal.
The e-mail system has been flooded, according to OIT. Some of it has to do with computer “worms.” Worms are similar to viruses. They generally replicate themselves until the host computer is out of disk space.
Another problem that has been occurring is mass e-mails with large attachments, some nearing 20 Megabytes, and for every additional address an e-mail is sent to the file gets duplicated on the server. This can take up large amounts of disk space.
OIT is trying to correct the problem.
The e-mail server has been upgraded creating more disk space, and the web server has been restored after an attack of the Nimda virus.
“I think you’ll see some improvements if you haven’t already,” Hopkins said.

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