By: Steele Smith, Staff Writer
The recent failures of Wofford’s campus wireless network (Air Terrier) have been inescapable this fall semester. For the past several weeks students and professors have coped with network failures and poor connections. Wednesday, Oct. 19 marked the first Wednesday in 3 weeks that Air Terrier had not experienced difficulties. Old Gold and Black spoke with Jason Womack, vice president of information technology and institutional research, to get to the bottom of these crashes.
Clarifying a common misconception, Womack said, “It’s not only the wireless that goes down, that’s just the place that you see it first. [Network issues] actually affect wired computers also, but it takes longer to bring them down.”
Elaborating further, he identified part of what the network problems has been: “What it boils down to is that computers use IP addresses. You get an IP address from a DHCP server. That’s what sends it out and gives you a lease.”
He described a lease as one of components of an IP address that grants a user access to the network. He identified the source of Wofford’s network woes as being “a moment where there’s a lot of traffic hitting the server.” When this happens, “[the DHCP server] doesn’t release its CPU processes. It gets hung up, and it doesn’t go back to normal.”
With Wofford being a campus with thousands of people making use of its network at one time, it’s understandable that it would become clogged at the times when the most people are accessing it. Womack explained that when the server becomes overloaded, it fails to distribute an IP address to the devices that request one. However, all the devices whose IP addresses have not expired are still able to make use of the network.
The IT department added an additional server to try and alleviate some of the traffic. “We have been working with Cisco engineers and the vendors of the equipment, trying to get them looking at logs and helping us analyze things,” detailed Womack. “The most recent thing we did is set up a third DHCP server to offload some of the traffic from the two that are giving us trouble.”
He also noted that students’ personal wireless routers can cause Air Terrier network to run slowly on other devices around it. These routers can cause interference with distribution of IP addresses by the school servers. He suggested that students with personal routers use wired connection to supply the internet to their devices.
The third server is a digital appliance that Wofford has been able to add to its wireless infrastructure at no cost. Unfortunately, adding another server is not a cure for all of Air Terrier’s struggles. “The only time you can really troubleshoot a problem is when it is occurring,” said Womack, “but I can’t let the problem occur for long because you guys need to use the network.”
Emails from the IT department alerting the campus that the network has been shut down have become commonplace. Womack explained why those emails were sent out: “We have a process now that we’ve discovered. We can bring the entire network down for 5 to 10 minutes, and when it comes back up it brings everything back to its base level. Then, things work.”
Despite being off to a shaky start, Womack was confident that the network will continue to improve. “I think that we’re going to have stability because of that third DHCP server,” he said. “We’ve made it through the crunch time. We have hit those main points without any real uptick in the load. Now the trick is finding a way to find the root cause.”