Trouble hits PennNet sys. once again

A Bell Atlantic circuiting problem caused service to shut down for over four hours early yesterday. The University's PennNet system was once again plagued with trouble early yesterday morning when a connection glitch with third-party network carrier Bell Atlantic brought service to a halt for more than four hours. The shut-down -- which occurred between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. -- marked the second consecutive day that PennNet service was disrupted, although the incidents were unrelated. On Wednesday, PennNet users experienced difficulty using many applications, such as the ICQ instant messenger, when University officials responded to security problems by restricting network access. But according to Executive Director for Networking Michael Palladino, yesterday's troubles were purely technical. He said that a circuiting problem caused by Bell Atlantic -- which provides a local-loop connection linking the University's local network to the national Internet service provider UUNet -- was the culprit. "The circuit was upgraded and wasn't fine-tuned properly," Palladino said. "In the process of upgrading to make it better, [Bell Atlantic] made it temporarily worse." According to Palladino, PennNet circuit monitoring devices detected problems with the network at around 4 a.m. and automatically paged an on-call University technician. Penn officials then contacted Bell Atlantic, which was able to bring its system back online by 8:30 a.m. But for more than four hours, PennNet users were unable to connect with networked computers outside the University. The problems meant that users could not send or receive e-mail from outside of Penn, or access Web sites not part of the www.upenn.edu domain. "Given the time, it didn't affect students too much," Palladino said. "But administrators who came into work early were antsy." According to University information systems officials, PennNet has been shut down due to technical difficulties five times in the past 11 months, resulting in about 20 hours of lost service. Although University officials said they have been pleased with PennNet's operation, they admit that the network would work better if they purchased a redundant Internet connection -- a backup system that many large institutions already have. But with costs for an independent backup connection adding more than $200,000 to the current $400,000 that was spent for UUNet, University officials have been reluctant to pay for additional bandwidth. Palladino, however, said that plans are in the works to have a redundant connection system in place by the fall semester, and perhaps as early as July. On the other hand, Penn officials said that security problems earlier this week may be more difficult to resolve. "The threat is always out there," Palladino said, pointing out the increasing risk of hacker attacks. "Even non-profits aren't safe from this stuff." Palladino explained that earlier this week, hackers launched a series of "flood-attacks" on PennNet. By using several automated computers, the hackers sent billions of data packets to Penn's intranet, clogging the system by overloading it with information. In response, the University put in place temporary filters to weed out some of the outside traffic, which caused some popular applications to malfunction. Penn officials eased up those restrictions, though, once the attacks seemed to stop. Palladino said that Penn officials are still investigating the recent attacks and the source remains unknown. However, he warned that if they continue or increase in intensity, the University may be forced to consider placing permanent filters on its network as well as other security measures.