Campus Briefs: Wednesday, February 25, 1998

Police arrest man for robbing student The suspect, who carried no identification and allegedly gave police a false name, approached the student in a stolen grey 1987 Buick LeSabre he was driving west on Walnut Street at about 3:30 a.m., police said. The student had just left David Rittenhouse Laboratory at 209 S. 33rd Street and was walking to his home in Center City. After asking the student for directions to 38th and Market streets, the suspect got out of the car and demanded the student give him his money, saying he had a gun and simulating a weapon with his hand in his jacket, University Police Det. Gary Heller said. After giving the man his wallet, which had about $40 in cash inside, the student crossed the street and called University Police from a nearby blue-light emergency telephone, he said. Meanwhile, the suspect returned to the car and was trying to start it when University Police arrived and arrested him. Another man who was in the car at the time escaped and fled north on 33rd Street. University Police discovered that the car had been stolen in Southwest Philadelphia on February 20 and transported the suspect to the Philadelphia Police Department's Southwest Detectives bureau at 55th and Pine streets for further processing. Detectives from the bureau are investigating the incident. -- Maureen Tkacik 'Bug' leads to problems for U. computer users A "bug" in Penn's computer-network infrastructure Monday at 7 p.m. caused a system breakdown for about an hour, preventing many people from being able to connect to the network for part of the night, officials said. Information Systems and Computing officials were notified of the problem at about 8 p.m. and restored partial service at 10:39 p.m., according to Michael Palladino, executive director of networking for ISC. The outage affected both students living on campus and students and other people who dial in from off-campus locations. Palladino explained that students in on-campus dormitories and some Greek houses equipped with Resnet were unable to run Telnet and World Wide Web browser programs. The "bug," according to Palladino, apparently resulted from an unusually high number of users simultaneously attempting to enter passwords to access the system. In fact, "[Monday] night's peak demands were at an all-time high," he said in a post to newsgroups. Palladino further described the outage as a "domino effect" of this increased capacity. "It took too long to authenticate [user IDs]," he explained. As a result, "it looked like a whole lot more people were on than there were." The University's central computers became overloaded and could no longer provide online connections. The system failure was the first since the fall of 1995, Palladino said. ISC engineers installed a new code in the system yesterday to rectify the problem. Palladino said he does not believe the problem will recur. -- Jeremy Reiss