Computer woes for students at SOU

At Southern Oregon University students and staff had trouble accessing their blackboard and e-mail accounts through the SOU Web site Feb. 5 to Feb. 8.

The loss of access was triggered by a malfunction with SOU’s servers Friday night and the problem was unable to be fixed until the following Monday.

“We aren’t so sure exactly how it happened,” said Roger Linhart, user services manager at SOU’s Information Technology department.

Currently, the IT department at SOU is in the process of hiring and training a new administrator to deal with these types of shutdowns.

“The system does not take care of it by itself,” Linhart said. “We need a trained … administrator to fix any problems from the system.”

Andrew Krug, a system administrator with IT, said the issue with the servers was a “files permissions problem.” Neither Blackboard nor the NetMail e-mail provider was able to read data on the SOU servers and transfer it to the accounts of people logging in.

“There were about 2 million files we had to go over,” Krug said.

One of the team technicians identified the problem and experts were brought in to repair the connection.

The reason access was down for so long was partially because the IT department at SOU couldn’t fix the problem independently and also because IT doesn’t always know when problems like this one occur.

“Don’t assume that IT knows that there’s a problem,” Kinhart said. “Please contact the student help desk line, or login into the ‘my SOU.’”

The IT desk posts a networks services alert on its Web site if there are any access issues with the SOU servers.

“That’s when people can know that we know there’s an issue going on that needs to be fixed,” Krug said.

SOU plans to upgrade its current computer systems this summer, while there is a lull in the academic schedule. However, SOU is contemplating a $200,000 switch from Blackboard to Enterprise, a new project system, in 2011 Krug said.

Krug also explains what IT plans to do for the systems in the future.

“We want to be able to have a bigger distance education system in 2011,” he said. “We‘re just looking toward any improvements,” Krug said.