Published on Friday, April 18, 2008

Glitch temporarily disables MyNIU

By DAVID THOMAS

For a brief moment, it seemed like the world had ended.

At least for students wanting to register for classes.

As students woke up Thursday morning to register for their classes on MyNIU, they were greeted with an unfriendly message: “We are currently undergoing maintenance. Please check back later.”

However, Todd Schlosser, staff member at Information Technology Services’ HelpDesk, said the problem was not limited to the new student information system. Blackboard, Z-mail and anything that uses Novell to log in experienced problems.

“It’s not the applications themselves causing the problems,” Schlosser said. “It’s the authentication.”

Helpdesk assistant director Sabrina Hammond said they first noticed the problem at 7:30 a.m., when they received several complaints about the inability to log in to several systems that required students to use their Novell Log-In IDs.

The number of people trying to access the systems worsened things, Hammond said.

“It’s busy trying to get a connection that’s failing, and then more requests [to log in] queue up,” Hammond said. “It begins to feed on itself.”

Login service was returned to all systems by 9:20 a.m. However, the cause of the problem is unclear. Hammond said that they will be conducting a root-cause analysis in the future.

“We have to dig, go back to the beginning, look at the system logs and then analyze what happened,” Hammond said.

Hammond could not say when the analysis would be finished.