Last Friday, the Office of Information Technology implemented an upgrade which temporarily disabled access to certain student network drives.
During the upgrade, students and faculty could not gain access to files because OIT was working on that specific portion of PSU’s computing system, said Sharon Blanton, chief information officer for OIT.
“We specifically chose Friday night so it wouldn’t be a busy time,” she said.
The OIT staff completed the upgrade on schedule, allowing students and faculty to access their files by 6 a.m. on Saturday. In addition, no one encountered difficulties and the upgrade went smoothly, according to Blanton.
The upgrade was performed to update the Storage Area Network, in order to increase storage space.
“We just keep consuming space,” Blanton said.
A SAN is a “network whose primary purpose is the transfer of data between computer systems and storage elements,” according to IBM’s Introduction to Storage Area Networks. Essentially, it connects a server to the physical storage devices.
According to Blanton, many classes at PSU use programs that create really large files, such as Geographic Information Systems courses and art classes.
Overall, Portland State’s growing population and the increase in the use of technology for the purposes of both education and research require larger and larger amounts of digital storage space.
Recently, OIT was also faced with the McAfee anti-virus software problem, which has since been eradicated.
The update McAfee released on April 21 inadvertently deleted a file essential to the Windows operating system, causing many campus computers running Windows XP to shut down or shut down and reboot incessantly, Blanton told the Vanguard.
McAfee released a software fix later that day and OIT staff began testing immediately.
According to Blanton, about 750 computers required the fix distributed by McAfee.
“You just feel so bad when people are in a class and computers are going berserk,” she said.
However, by the end of that night, OIT staff had restored all of the affected computers to their original capacity.
“We had everything recovered by the time people came back the next day,” Blanton said.
No one at PSU lost data and the McAfee bug did not adversely affect any hardware.
According to the Computer Action Team’s website, which operates and maintains the computers of the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, the faulty McAfee update affected no more than five of the MCECS computers.
Unlike OIT, the CAT does not instantly install automatic updates, and therefore did not suffer nearly as much from the update as the rest of campus.