Sage, the university’s online records system, was down for approximately an hour on Wednesday when the first round of registration for the Spring 2016 semester began. Sage came back on in the afternoon and has been stable since then, so according to University Registrar Mark Hewitt, there will be no changes to the registration as a result. Students with enrollment appointments during this period were unable to register for classes when they first became eligible.
Sage came back at 12:18 when the servers were restarted, but “because we still hadn’t figured out what caused sage to go down, we didn’t tell anyone that the system was available until about 12:30-12:45,” said Lisa DeMings, director of enterprise solutions at LTS (Library and Technology Services).
While the network was down, students placed calls to Academic Services with questions about Sage, and during the break between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. classes, students asked others if they were encountering the same difficulties. Sage was down for all students, but since its return registration has continued as usual.
The first round of registration was “as robust as usual,” even with the difficulties, Hewitt said. 89 percent of eligible students registered for class.
“There is unfortunately no fair way to redo Round 1—we would have had to stop registration for this week entirely and attempt to reschedule it for the next week—dropping students who had successfully enrolled,” said Hewitt.
Hewitt acknowledged the issues with Sage were “distressing.” He said attempts to help the students with enrollment appointments during the period the site was down would be “disruptive to all students and faculty.”
PeopleSoft Tools, the outside program that operates Sage, updated itself a few weeks ago and reset certain items, including to their default memory settings, according to Hewitt and DeMings. LTS had to re-customize the settings and increase the memory allocated to the server to accommodate student traffic. Default memory settings allocate 512 megabytes of memory, however the necessary custom setting is two gigabytes of memory, DeMings said.
