By Bradley Rosenberg

Since returning to campus after New Year’s, many Northeastern students have been upset. They have been welcomed back to campus by new professors, new co-op employers, but most importantly to many, they have returned to no Internet connection.

The NU network has been shutdown several times over the past few weeks, and the students are left in a state of furious wonder as to what is going on with their Internet.

“What’s the deal with these guys?” says freshman computer engineering major Patrick Cunningham. “I think ResNet needs to get their act together because I can’t send e-mails, I can’t instant message my friends, can’t get on the Internet…these are all methods of communication that I need.”

Despite difficulties over the past few weeks with the Internet connection so many students feel they deserve, most were unaware of the recent problems until they returned from intersession.

Mia Monte-Lowrey, a freshman mechanical engineering major, is also frustrated with the difficulty she has had using a service she feels she pays for and should have. Monte-Lowrey argues that “people pay a lot of money to live in these dorms” and “when [the ResNet employees] shut stuff down, we can’t access grades, can’t e-mail professors…[we] feel like we’re not getting [the services] we paid for.”

“There were people who didn’t know what classes to go to [on the first day of school] because of the shutdowns,” added Monte-Lowrey’s roommate and freshman engineering major, Erin Ballard.

In light of the recent Internet woes, many students are demanding to know what the reasons are behind their ailments.

Bob Weir, the vice president of Information Services for NU, believes the trouble to be “denial of service.”

“Denial of service,” Weir said, “is [any occurring] communication…that consumes all bandwidth to a particular host or service.”

When a denial of service happens, the network shuts down. Weir uses the analogy of a flooding pipe to describe the cause of the students’ frustrations.

“A denial of service can have the effect of flooding the pipe,” he says. “It floods the pipe so others can’t get through it. You get a particular machine that floods the pipe with so much traffic, and it takes up all the capacity.”

According to Weir, these instances of “floods” come from three sources: bandwidth abusers or “top talkers,” viruses, and, as he puts it, “the rare hacker.”

“Top talkers aren’t flooding the pipe,” Weir remarks, “They are taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. [The usual causes of these instances] are either viruses or external attacks that end up taking control of a person’s workplace. Most of the cases are unintentional [or not done for specific purposes.]”

Mark Hildebrand, the director of Enterprise Systems, comments that ResNet employees “block thousands of attacks [to the server] a day, but [that] maybe one will get through. This one attack can do anything from slowing the network down to a complete shutdown.”

Weir says that “one attack affects the services of thousands of others. In the time it takes to manually respond, the server becomes unavailable.”

Weir assures that the ResNet staff pays close attention to these problems, and that they will continue to pay attention seven days a week, 24 hours a day. He says every university has to deal with the same situations, but some NU students don’t see it that way.

Freshman Mark Shekleton, an electrical and computer engineering major, believes that ResNet is “not using their network as they should,” and that they need “to spend a little more money on security so that they won’t have these problems.”

“My sister goes to the University of Connecticut,” he says, “and she’s always online.”

“We have invested a significant amount of time and money [in ResNet] over the past several years and we will continue to do so,” Weir said. “[Since its creation,] we’ve invested almost two million dollars in improving the network and have since seen a significantly improved service. If you look at our uptime, our availability is in the high 90 percent.”

When told about Weir’s availability comment, Cunningham became livid.

“ResNet has been down every single night since I’ve come back from vacation,” Cunningham raved while seated at his dorm room computer, “and, as a matter of fact, it’s down right now. They really need to get their act together.”

Weir explains this seemingly perpetual state of shutdown by saying that “if your Internet is down, your downtime is 100 percent, because you need to get things done.”

“The fact is, we’re a lot better than we used to be,” he says. “If you have something like this, what you do is you get this service as good as you can. One [attack] gets through, you have a team find it and work on it. In addition, you then analyze the cause of the outage and learn how to stop the outage. You add it to your portfolio of how to stop these things. We’re online a little more than 90 percent of the time, but I don’t want anyone to think that that means we don’t take this seriously. Our goal and intention is 100 percent.”

While ResNet may not be online all of the time, Director of Networking Services Bob Whelan does have some suggestions for students who wish to minimize their downtime.

“You can start by keeping your software updated and patched,” Whelan said. “If you’re offered a new download, like Windows XP, download it. Also, ResNet will provide virus software for you and if there any further problems you can call the ResNet software office. Finally, keep your anti-viruses current.”

Many students argue that they already do this, and that these problems are the result of ResNet not doing its job. Weir still maintains that NU’s network is the best it can be.