Registration this year, did not go as smoothly as everyone had hoped. There were occasional issues with the server when seniors registered on November 7, only occurring in Sheffield Hall.
“Late in the morning of November 7, a contractor accidentally shutdown the power to the network equipment in Sheffield Hall, only affecting students in Sheffield Hall,” says OIT staff.
This was a relatively small, very centralized, issue.
The greatest issue arose when sophomores went to register Tuesday morning, on November 15th. There was an issue with the server that persisted long enough for registration to be postponed to the next morning, November 16th, at 7am. Many sophomores voiced their concerns and discontent with their situation.
OIT provides detail saying, “On Tuesday the 15th shortly before sophomore registration began a very slow memory leak in our router software which affected the router performance and prevented access to the Banner network.”
“It was not as awful as my previous semesters but still terrible, extremely stressful, and slightly depressing knowing that I had no chance of getting into the classes I absolutely needed,” says sophomore, Jen Andon. She continued saying, “The server basically crashed while I was trying to sign in multiple times, slowing my registration process and making it even more stressful.”
Sophomore Jordi Proskinitopoulos agrees saying, “UNH has to get its stuff together if we’re paying 50 thousand a year to come here.”
Commuter students had an even larger problem, as they were not on campus for their classes. Registration caused many students to miss their 8am classes because they were stuck at home dealing with registration.
“I wasn’t officially notified [that registration was postponed] until 7:45am, so I didn’t have enough time to make it to my 8am on time – I ended up having to skip it,” says commuter Rebecca Spargo.
The UNH Office of Information Technology (OIT) worked all morning to resolve the issues and make registration run smoothly the next morning. However, some students still voiced some concerns with the way they handled the situation.
“They handled it fairly well this year, they did solve the problem. However, why would they not troubleshoot beforehand, knowing the mass amount of people registering that day, but they did fix it in one days’ time,” says Andon.
Spargo was unhappy with the communication saying, “There were things I admired and disliked about how UNH handled the problems that arose, but overall, I was extremely dissatisfied with the whole situation. I felt that they had kept their students in the dark, especially because my mom knew more about the situation from the UNH Parents and Families page than I did.”
Some students took to Facebook to voice their frustration through designing memes. The Class of 2019 page filled with pictures from angry students using their frustration to create something comical.
“I loved the meme war this caused on Facebook!” says Proskinitopoulos. He continues saying, “I would love for that to happen again.”
When asked if the problem was preventable, OIT responded saying, “Because this was an unknown bug in the router code it really wasn’t preventable. Up until right before registration all systems had been performing correctly and gave no indication of a pending problem. We had staff up early and monitoring all systems before registration started.”
OIT spent time before registration to better equip Banner for the high demand. They replaced the database server with quicker hardware and added servers as well as more memory to handle the capacity.
Student are encouraged, for further registrations, to limit their browser windows to one. This will prevent unnecessary problems from happening in the future.
“For security, the Banner SSB system is designed to disallow a person’s account from logging in multiple times simultaneously,” says OIT.
OIT closed saying, “We fully understand the sensitivity of registration, and commit all our resources to supporting it. Unfortunately unpredictable issues can happen with technology, and often at the worst time. We thank the students for their understanding and we will remain committed to providing the highest level of support and attention we can.”
The Office of the Registrar was contacted but declined to comment on the issue.