Throughout the past few months, there has been major outages with various Information Technology services, the most recent occurred with a campus-wide printing outage. There is a major disconnect between students and the Information Technology department on where the issues are and who is responsible for the outages, mostly because it is unclear to them as well.
Network and Systems Administrator Michael Mott has been working tirelessly on the printing issues since the outage on October 15. “The issue on October 15 was due to print jobs getting stuck in an errored state and as these errored jobs built up they overwhelmed our print servers,” explained Mott. The Information Technology team is still not certain of the cause of the outage, but after providing logs from our print servers to SymQuest and Papercut developers (our print management software) there is evidence of a bug in the Paper Cut software.
SymQuest’s report of the incident agrees with Mott’s claim that the issue is with the Paper Cut system. “I’m looking at the St. Lawrence server history and there seems to be a system wide ongoing issue with Paper Cut. It appears that there were jobs stuck in the queue.” Said an anonymous SymQuest customer service representative.
Despite the accusations, Paper Cut claims that beyond the logs that St. Lawrence University supplied after the issues on October 15th, the company has no access to any St. Lawrence system. To further the complexity, Paper Cut customer service representative, Sean MacDonald is unaware of any printer queue malfunction ever causing a Paper Cut system wide outage. “Although entirely possible, in my year and a half with Paper Cut I’ve never seen a problem with the queue that causes Paper Cut to fail” said Macdonald.
St. Lawrence University student Tomas Cespedes, a Computer Science major, agrees with Paper Cut’s stance that the printers queue could not have been the problem. “From a Computer Science standpoint I do not understand how the queue could cause the problem. If there was a specific job causing the issue it could be as simple as a power cycle to clear the entire queue,” said Cespedes.
The SymQuest report of the printer outage is an on-going case because the cause of keeping print jobs in the erroneous state is still unknown, meaning another outage is possible. However, yesterday Mott suggested that although the problem might not be known but the solution was given to him. “We were provided with a hotfix earlier today that I’ll be applying tomorrow morning,” said Mott.
Director of Services and Outreach, Rene Thatcher wants the student body to understand that the Information Technology team at St. Lawrence apologizes for the inconveniences on student’s lives and wants the department to be completely transparent through the whole solution process.. “If you are stress we are stressed, we would never want stress like this.” Rene Thatcher said.