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By Erin Morgan
For The Maine Campus
University of Maine students and faculty have been experiencing problems concerning access to the FirstClass intranet system. Issues range from denied login to a recent crash of the entire FirstClass system. These complications are interfering with access campus-wide and provoking concern over the system’s reliability.
Many professors rely on FirstClass as a method of assigning homework and receiving assignments from their students. It is also an efficient way for students to communicate with staff, family, friends and each other.
“In my three years at the University of Maine, Information Technologies has never seemed to have it together,” Rahul Kasat, a senior computer science major, said. “It seems that these so-called software problems that have led to all these FirstClass outages could have been avoided with a bit of forethought and planning.”
John Gregory, executive director of Information Technologies, said there have been several performance inaccuracies from Sept. 24 until Oct. 1. In order to prevent further crashes, FirstClass was shut down multiple times during this 10-day span. Modifications have been made in an effort to reduce or eliminate technical glitches in the FirstClass system. He said the key to fixing the technical problems is to stick with a stable version.
“It is our goal to reach a stable state and remain there without major changes to the system until the end of the semester,” Gregory said.
“Perhaps the best way to reduce chaos and confusion is to explain why we are having these problems and that they have more to do with students than [with] IT itself,” he said.
Other problems have had little to do with FirstClass, but everything to do with the Internet. Connection speeds on campus have been slower this year than in previous years. Bandwidth plays a large role in this issue.
“Bandwidth refers to how fast data can transfer through a network in a fixed amount of time, “Robin Shaler, IT Help Center coordinator, said. “It takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second.”
That means that all the file-sharing students do through Napster, Morpheus and other file-sharing systems is the primary source of the bandwidth problems, she said. Increasing bandwidth does not really help, however.
“IT now has one-and-a-half times more bandwidth available to its network than it had last year. Many universities have spent a great deal of money to increase the amount of bandwidth available to the dorms, hoping it would resolve the problem,” Shaler said. “What they discovered, however, was that the extra bandwidth was 100 percent consumed as soon as it was available.”
But solutions can be very expensive to fund.
It has been rumored that UNET, which provides networking for UMaine, is trying to take over IT. However, this is not the case.
“[IT and UNET] each manages the services it provides,” Gerry Dube, director of UNET, said. “It is not an issue of control. FirstClass is a service provided by IT for the [UMaine] community. As such, UNET has no involvement with its operation and maintenance. IT deals with a number of functions on the campus that UNET does not, such as maintaining computer clusters and providing network services to the dorms.”
Gregory said there are plans in the making for a single campus provider encompassing the duties of IT and UNET, however, no official date has been set.
