Students who had their email password erased were forced to wait in line at the Seaver Computing Center to reset them.

ITS Erases At Least Thirty Percent of Passwords

By Sarah Kuriakose
Staff Writer

Thursday, October 2, many Pomona residents found themselves locked out of their email accounts after an Information Technology Services (ITS) error invalidated over one-third of the Pomona community’s passwords. In an attempt to synchronize a new campus portal for faculty with the existing database, many of the old passwords were reset. Although the process was aborted and the server remained up, many students, faculty, and staff found this the latest in a long list of grievances concerning ITS.

The incident was prompted by an unknown error in a for establishing a campus portal for faculty. This portal, which is now running, allows faculty to access information about student advisees, class rosters, and other teaching issues through a web interface. Paul Young ’07, an ITS staff member explained, “Basically, we were synchronizing two databases with different passwords. We thought that the old passwords would be imprinted onto the new database but the reverse actually happened.”

ITS had been planning this campus portal for some time and testing stages had been completed. Executive Director of ITS Ken Pflueger, said, “We had tested the process. For some reason, this time it went haywire.” In similar situations in the past, ITS has manually forced the passwords into the new system. Thursday’s accident was a result of an attempt to automate that process. The end result was that the campus portal was non-functional and many Pomona residents had their passwords reset. Those affected had to contact ITS and, in many cases, actually had to go to the Seaver Computing Center to create new passwords to access their email.

Pflueger estimated that one-third of the community was affected. “Looking at the call volume, I’d definitely put the number of people affected under 50 percent.” However, many students believed that up to 80 percent of old passwords didn’t work. Peter Kelly ’07 says, “A lot of kids had their friends in ITS fix the problem, so ITS has no clue about the real magnitude of the problem. It just shows another way they weren’t effective in dealing with the situation.”

ITS is aware of complaints about response times and services, but claims their actions were as effective as possible. Pflueger said, “We didn’t have a clue this would happen. There wasn’t much, unfortunately, that we could have done.” ITS attempted to notify students through student staff members and the department website. They also tried to make the community aware of the password issue through the use of email and the digester; although, Pflueger admited that these would not have been helpful to those locked out of their email accounts. During the two days after the incident, ITS also had additional staff on call.

Despite these measures, students remain displeased about the incident. Kris Skovbroten ’06 said, “I’m sorry, but what kind of idiot deletes all the passwords?” Hayden Eberhart ’07 added “I was especially annoyed we actually had to go up [to ITS] and get [the passwords] fixed.” ITS required students to be physically present for the password changes mainly for security purposes.

Although the problem has been dealt with, Pflueger said there is no guarantee something comparable will not occur again. To directly combat issues of this nature, programmers are working on developing a test network, which will be functional within six months. The test network will be a miniature version of the Pomona network, containing a similar variety of machines with a smaller number of users. “Now, we do all the tests we can, but obviously we can’t get the full picture. In the future, anytime we’re deploying a major change, we would deploy it through the test network first,” said Pflueger.

Criticism of ITS is nothing new. Over the past few years, there have been at least two similar incidents. In late September 2001, the entire email system crashed and was down for a full day. This incident alerted ITS to weak points in the backup system, which were reinforced soon afterwards. “[Fixing these problems] is not to say something couldn’t happen with the server crashing again,” cautions Pflueger. Last semester, when Internet service went up and down for a full week. This unreliability was blamed on equipment issues in the ISP’s local office.

Many students cite Macintosh incompatibility issues, viruses, Internet downtimes, and difficulty in changing passwords as common ITS problems. Staff members comment that many of these are either relatively small issues or out of their control. For example, the Pomona network supports Windows and Macintosh platforms equally. “There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the system that Mac users should have more problems than Windows users," remarked Young,"It’s just that ITS staff doesn’t have as much experience with Macs, so problems take longer to fix.”

In response to many of these complaints, Pflueger pointed out the limitations of ITS. “Things like viruses are always around. We try to deal with those as best we can by keeping students informed and making fixes available,” said Pflueger

While the reliability of internet access remains a concern, ITS is not responsible for the college's internet connection. Verizon is the ISP for the Claremont University Consortium, and the connection is managed through Harvey Mudd College. The Colleges have no control over Internet service.

The consortium is currently putting in a connection through a second ISP: SBC communications. Pflueger says, “Things might be slower, but if Verizon goes down, the Internet will still work.”

Pomona College is also planning a major upgrade to the email system, a development that is sure to excite students who are frustrated with the complicated set-up of the current system. The new webmail interface will focus more on functionality. ITS is currently waiting for the software to be shipped from Microsoft, and plans to finish upgrading email by the next academic year.

Deletion of the passwords led to much grumbling, but Laura Aylward ’07 sees a silver lining. “It was inconvenient but it got fixed,” Young commented. “Generally we’re [ITS] able to fix problems pretty well. People like to joke but we usually get the job done.”