Paws web site up and running

By Joseph Tkacik
Staff Writer

Despite some problems in the past few months, the Paws web site on campus is once again functional and is due to undergo some “tweaking” in the next few weeks.
Jim Wolfgang, chief information officer of informational & instructional technology at GC&SU, has assured everyone that the problems that have been experienced previously are a thing of the past, and we should expect to see much more reliability out of the site.
“We have been using the banner system here at GC&SU since 1995, and since we have started using it, we have used four different versions to date,” said Wolfgang. “As technology and client needs increase, they force us to change the systems to more complex and more labor intensive versions.”
As the fear of the Y2K bug swept the nation, GC&SU was forced to update most of their software to be sure that there were not going to be any problems with the site and to make sure that no information was lost. These upgrades included a new Banner system, a new Oracle system, a new version of UNIX, and a new server. All of these upgrades were essential to GC&SU being up-to-date with the rest of the world.
“Whenever registration started for spring semester 2002, students were having a lot of problems accessing their class schedules and getting the information that they needed from the PAWS server. This was due to the fact that there was a component of Banner that was not working properly; this component was the one that checked the prerequisite courses for the students,” said Wolfgang. “Instead of the system checking your class prerequisites once, it was looping for as much as 500 times for each check that it had to do. This was bogging down the system drastically.”
When the OIIT team at GC&SU encounters a problem like this on campus, they regularly head to the services of the main OIIT in Athens.
“OIIT is a state-mandated department that knows these systems, and they are always able to help us when we need it,” said Wolfgang.
One problem that the OIIT here on campus has run into is that the upgrades that they perform are not able to be tested at their limits until they release them to the public.
“You can’t really know if something is going to work until you test it at its limits. We are currently experimenting with a new idea where we will take a large number of volunteers from campus and let them all log on to the system at once and see if they can break it,” said Wolfgang. “Testing a system at its limits is really the only way that you can see the flaws that it may have.”
“There is no one else that is more disappointed in the system when it fails than us,” said Wolfgang. “The most unfortunate thing is that we have come so far. Our goal is to satisfy you the consumer. Please tell us, not others, when you see something wrong. We truly need your help.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Dec 7 2001. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry