In addition, the IT department has joined IT representatives from UMass and Hampshire, Smith and Mt. Holyoke Colleges to consider ways to collaborate to improve bandwidth.
Director of Information Technology Phil Fitz sent an email to the student body on Feb. 6 explaining the latest efforts, which include restarting the email server daily from from 6:00 a.m. to 6:15 a.m. and again at 6:00 p.m. to 6:15 p.m.. "Restarting the server is an attempt to keep email performance at acceptable levels. Performance is generally best after a restart, but degrades over time. ... The problem has been escalated to the highest technical level at Microsoft. They are analyzing performance logs now," he wrote.
These problems were clearly not anticipated when Fitz sent an earlier email to the College on Dec. 11, 2002. "The new Exchange 2000 server will be faster and more reliable than the current Exchange 5.5 server and will feature an improved web interface. Once we complete the upgrade you will see these improvements without having to change the way you access your email. During [the upgrade] everyone on campus will experience some disruption in e-mail service," he wrote.
The other four colleges in the five college consortium are not having the same difficulties. They, too, have already or are in the process of converting to new main servers. "Overall, our email system and Internet access have worked well although we've occasionally had problems related to upstream outages, equipment failure, or utilization issues," said Tom Manley, manager of information services at Hampshire.
"The UMass email servers have not been troublesome once in the whole time I've been here. I just began dealing with it in Outlook Express, and I have begun to use my UMass account so much more because of the added convenience," said Matt Caesar, a freshman at UMass.
"We have this really old system of email called PINE and it's kind of archaic but not that bad. Our Internet used to go down a lot, but they usually fix it within a couple minutes," said Erin Nylen-Wysocki, a freshman at Mt. Holyoke.
Email is not the only problem the IT department is currently working to resolve. The department has joined with representatives from the other four colleges in the consortium to discuss a project to lay fiber-optic cable between the colleges with a connection to Springfield, the closest place that traffic can be uploaded to the Internet.
The colleges hope to save money by joining together in this venture. "Since the mid 1980s, spearheaded by Dan Blanchard at UMass, there has been active cooperation in networking among the five colleges, [joining] the Internet together in 1991," said Mike Crowley, head of networking at Mt. Holyoke College.
Manley explained the need to lay fiber between the five colleges. "Like most colleges, we've seen demand for Internet bandwidth increase significantly over the last few years and we expect it to continue. In the recent past, we've taken steps to upgrade and manage capacity by adding T1 circuits and using a bandwidth management tool called Packeteer," said Manley. "The five college dark fiber initiative provides an opportunity to have redundant high capacity bandwidth between the five colleges and to the Internet to accommodate demand over the foreseeable future. So, we're excited about that possibility," he said.
The project would improve Internet speed problems that are common to all five institutions in the consortium.
"UMass's Internet access on the other hand, is so-so. If you aren't computer savvy (or [don't know] someone who is), common every day tasks can be hell due to the lack of speed at peak usage times," said Caesar.
Cost is another motivating factor in the colleges' desire to own fiber instead of leasing it. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, "The four colleges and the university expect to take advantage of the current downturn in the fiber-optic industry to increase their data-network capacity, add redundant links to handle network outages and reduce their local-circuit charges for data-communications services." By combining their traffic, the colleges would also be eligible for traffic volume discounts.
Fitz expects that parts of the project could be completed within one year.
The project will also increase network capacity and the possibility of "all sorts of high-bandwidth applications among the campuses," Rosio Alvarez, associate chancellor for information technologies at UMass told The Chronicle.
Once the colleges acquire and install all of the necessary equipment, they must then be able to manage it. According to The Chronicle, "UMass officials say they have network engineers on staff who can work with such equipment."
The actual price of the project has not yet been determined. "Five large fiber-optic carriers have submitted confidential bids and are in price negotiations with the consortium," according to The Chronicle.