Planned service upgrade scheduled for Tuesday

Ann Burk, Chadron State’s chief information officer, said the upgrade will create a network outage that could extend into Tuesday evening. During the outage, network services, including telephones, will be unavailable.

The firewall, which is being installed in response to increased network traffic, will impact and improve response times on campus and increase the network’s production, or throughput. However, the degree to which the firewall may address the latency issue with Sakai is unknown.

“The new firewall may or may not help to resolve the issue with Sakai,” Chadron State College President Dr. Randy Rhine said. “We’re working on the firewall and that’s a positive thing because we think it could have some impact. Replacing the firewall is eliminating a possible factor and we will continue to investigate a number of avenues related to Sakai until we get it fixed because it is a priority.”

Although Tuesday’s installation may cause a delay in submitting final grades for 8-week courses, Rhine said a new firewall was essential.

“I am aware Oct. 21, is the deadline for grades to be submitted for the first eight weeks. I understand this firewall installation may cause a delay for some faculty members to enter their grades, but the availability of the network engineers to do the installation of the new firewall sooner than expected is a prudent decision. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but I’m confident the benefit of a new firewall outweighs the network interruption.”

Burk said access to Sakai, MyCSC, SAP (Employee Self Service), Nebraska Information System (NIS), Computer Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) will be unaffected from off-campus during Tuesday’s planned network outage. Once services are stable, Information Technology will notify the campus through email, the CSC website and Sakai.