Campus-wide network outages and harmful emails have plagued the Andover servers in recent weeks. The campus experienced network outages on Friday, October 23 and Tuesday October 27. The Technology Office said that they have not yet determined the cause of the outages. David Hasbany, Associate Director of Technology, said the outages may have stemmed from an overtaxed network device, which prevented information from flowing properly. Nancy Alpert, Associate Director of Network and Systems Services, informed the school that the Tech Office is attempting “to remediate our recent network problems.” The outages caused inconvenience among students who needed email or internet access. Zac Elder ’11 said, “the outage was an inconvenience because this school runs on emails, and nobody could access theirs.” Maggie Shoemaker ’12 said, “I was almost in tears because I couldn’t print out my homework in the PACC.” Adrian Lehnen ’10 said, “[The Technology Office] should’ve notified teachers so students could have gotten more leeway on their assignments.” Although his lesson plans were disrupted by the outage, Paul Tortorella, Instructor in English, said, “I think the people in technology did a terrific job getting the system going again in a timely manner.” Kathryn McQuade, Instructor in English, said, “I don’t think the outage was tremendously disruptive,” she said. McQuade added that it may have been a problem for those students who rely on email to print essays out in the library. In the hopes of fixing the network, the Tech Offices replaced part of the core network router. This caused a complete network outage on Thursday night, October 29th, from midnight to 1am. Charlie Budney ’12 said, “The network outage prohibited me from handing in a paper by email to my teacher. It was really annoying, because lots of people are still up doing their homework at that hour.” The school was also recently plagued by a number of hoax emails with virus attachments. Michael Wade, Senior Tech Support Specialist, sent out a notice on Monday regarding the “dangerous virus in the attachment.” According to Wade, these emails are meant to look they are from a trusted source, but are actually contain potentially harmful material. Elder said he received one of these emails. “Luckily, I didn’t open the attachment,” he said. “It looked very official.” The source of the increasing tech problems on campus is still unknown to the Technology Office.
