Information Technology Services (ITS) has resolved the source of the issue that was affecting the campus wireless network as of Thursday at 10:35 p.m., according to Information Technology Services’ status updates.
“We did an upgrade configuration over the summer, and, overtime, the configuration kind of faltered,” said Chief Information Officer Jim La Creta in an interview with The Brandeis Hoot. “When we got to the point where we realized it was faltering, we started trying to fix and then it was reconfigured this past week.”
The switches, controllers that allow networked devices to “talk to each other efficiently,” according to Cisco, were replaced as a part of a $2 million project that started in March and was finished over the summer. These switches exist in all the buildings, and there are roughly 300 on campus, according to Chief Information Security Officer David Albrecht in an interview with The Hoot.
“Over the weekend, we were looking to try to find out exactly what the issue was—the wireless manufacturer was having a hard time determining what that was,” said Albrecht. “Tuesday morning was when we isolated what the issue was. The longest amount of time was trying to determine what the actual problem was. This was one they had never seen before. The person that they flew in from HP from Aruba was one they send out for triage for the biggest clients that have when there’s a network-wide outage, so it wasn’t a run-of-the-mill engineer. This was the top-of-the-line engineer at Aruba. He couldn’t even figure out what it was.”
Albercht also told The Hoot that ITS is aware that there “a cellular phone issue on campus,” and they’re trying to bring in an integrator on campus to “essentially bring in AT&T and Verizon signal on campus and put it in buildings.”
“We’re trying to actively change how we do cellular coverage on campus,” said Albercht. “If [cellular issues] were raised to us on a regular basis, we may have been able to fix it sooner. If students are having issues on the wireless network, the easiest way to fix them is to have people report them.”
La Creta said that only 30 to 40 reports came to them in the last week, which is not out of the ordinary for a given week. Albrecht said that they really appreciate when people report the issues that they are having because it helps ITS troubleshoot the problems. The technology help desk is located in Goldfarb Library, and they can be reached at 781-736-HELP (4357) or at help@brandeis.edu.
