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August 20, 2004 > News > Freshmen have difficulties creating Owlnet accounts

Freshmen have difficulties creating Owlnet accounts

By Ian Everhart | Thresher Editorial Staff

Obtaining a username and password proved to be more difficult than expected for some new students, who encountered slowly loading pages and repeated error messages when they applied for Owlnet accounts Sunday afternoon.

Senior Systems Administrator Dean Lane said the volume of the application requests overloaded the server.

“We had a much higher turnout than we expected, and the server that this process was running on was not able to feed all the requests that people were making on it,” Lane said.

Will Rice College adviser Elizabeth Stephens said some members of her group had trouble when they tried to register for accounts at Ryon Engineering Laboratory Sunday afternoon.

“We were told that the server wasn’t able to handle the load all at once, and it was just ridiculously slow,” Stephens, a Will Rice senior, said. “That was the time — that space between saying goodbye to parents and finishing unpacking and Matriculation — was kind of designed for campus tours, setting up Owlnet accounts and settling in.”

She said five members of her group were able to register, but the computers two students were using froze, so they were unable to receive their accounts.

“Probably the biggest impact that it had was that it was a negative introduction to Rice’s IT system,” Stephens said.

Lane said the Information Technology Department had not told coordinators or advisers to register the new students’ usernames at any particular time. Campus-wide Orientation Week Coordinator Kaleen Tison said there was no item on the master campus schedule that dictated when students should apply for their Owlnet accounts. Instead, individual colleges and their college computing associates established the times.

Brown College co-adviser Ro Perez said she was disappointed by delays caused by the application process.

“It took away from our group time, taking away from some of the crucial parts of O-Week early on in O-Week,” Perez, a Hanszen College sophomore said. “Taking an hour out of your time in O-Week is very hard to do. It’s a very busy schedule, and we don’t have that type of time.”

Lane said IT staff upgraded the application site to a faster server Sunday afternoon when the problems were discovered.

“As soon as we noticed that the server was overloaded, we started to take steps to resolve the problem,” Lane said.

Many students applied for accounts Monday, but Lane said no other issues of overloading occurred.

Interim Registrar Diane Havlinek said she does not anticipate any problems when new students register for classes today.

Havlinek said incoming students were randomly divided into four groups and will register sequentially in one of four hour-long time slots starting at 8 a.m.

According to Havlinek, new students were mailed their ESTHER login PINs in July and have been able to review course selections online since then.

She said the randomization means that unlike in the past, no

particular college’s new students will have the advantage of being able to register first.

End of article

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