Macintosh users who live in Hill College House report that they have been having trouble accessing the Internet for the last few months.
The problem occurs intermittently and affects only Mac users by disabling their Internet connections for periods ranging from a few hours to several days. Residents say the problem began sometime in February, when the entire network for the building went down.
Wireless Internet through PennNet, however, has not been affected.
"My Internet doesn't work, and it comes on and off sporadically," Engineering freshman Mojdeh Toomarian said. "And the information technology advisers don't know how to fix it. A lot of them have tried."
College freshman Lauren Newman has contacted ITAs for the same reason. "Off and on we'll have Internet connection, and then it'll be gone for five hours, or a day at a time."
Newman said the problem has persisted for "a few months."
"I still don't have the Internet now," she said.
According to John Merz, the information technology support specialist for Hamilton, Hill and Spruce college houses, "this has been a random and intermittent problem."
"In most cases it resolves itself before we can acquire and duplicate the data for testing and forward the info to" Information Systems & Computing, Merz said.
Mike LaMonaca, the program coordinator and Web applications director for College House Computing, said that "these sorts of things are tough to troubleshoot because you can only do tests when the problem is actually occurring."
He also said that he has not heard of complaints from Hill since February.
The root of the problem is largely unknown, but results when Mac users attempt to sign online and are unable to get an Internet protocol number -- the individual identifying number on a computer. However, sometimes users are able to obtain an IP number but are still unable to connect to the Internet.
IP numbers typically expire after four months.
"The ITAs figured out a temporary solution to the problem by manually assigning an IP number to students who came in for help," LaMonaca said.
"But this isn't the best solution. They might give you someone else's number, and that could create conflicts," he added.
LaMonaca also said that the lack of Internet for Macs most likely involves networking.
Hill's structure could also be to blame. ITAs have told students that the aging wires in the building could be the root of the problem, though they do not know for sure.
Merz said that measures are currently being taken to find out what is causing the problem. "We're monitoring the service requests to see if we can find a relationship in the problems reported so far," he said.
Toomarian is receiving help already, and was contacted by Merz within the last few days about resolving the issue.
