We all have a personal horror story about what happened the first time we tried to bring our computers into the 21st Century. The most important principle of networking became Murphy's Law. Multiply your personal experience by approximately 1500, and you get a sense of what students and Academic Computing Services (ACS) faced this fall.
ACS, Data Network Operations (DNO) and Telecommuni-cations (Telecom) had a lofty summer goal: ethernet six residential colleges. By the time the students would roll back to campus in August, every common room in Branford, Calhoun, JE, Stiles, Saybrook, and Trumbull would be tested and certified live, just waiting for a student yearning connectivity. The goal in a normal summer would have been challenging; in the year of Special Olympics, it proved close to impossible.
With yeoman work, the colleges were wired in time, but not tested. The lack of testing proved critical, as wiring anomalies abounded. Further, Old Campus, feeling left out, also chose this time to suffer from major network perturbations. Add to this the over 400 Windows users who needed extensive personal attention to get their machines connected, and we had a genuine JANFU (Joint Army-Navy Foul Up). How to fix?
Through patience and toil. Student Computing Assistants (CAs) and staff professionals from ACS, DNO and Telecom worked days, evenings and weekends over the first seven weeks of the term identifying problems, triaging calls and soothing students who were understandably upset over the unavoidable delay in getting online. Only the patience and cooperation of the students and the CAs, (along with the gallows humor of the professional staff) made the entire saga bearable.
While the time was stressful, the lessons learned will enable campus network expansion to proceed more smoothly in the future. The ethernetting of the remaining six colleges will begin in the spring semester, rather than June. Over the coming months, ACS will also investigate other options aimed at making the networking process less intrusive and far more reliable. In the meantime, the knowledge that the WWW is a few feet away from your bed should go far to ease the memory of initial frustration.