A hardware issue caused a few headaches for students waking up at 6 a.m. to register for classes last week. The glitch came when myLongwood, the portal students use for class registration, encountered a memory problem due to the load of students who logged into the system at once. According to Director of User Support Services Kim Redford over 1,200 students logged in on Nov. 7, the first day of registration problems.
A number of students wrote on The Rotunda's Facebook page about the problems they were experiencing that morning. "In all four years at Longwood, I never had a good registration experience," said Katie Marble, senior. "You would think they would have resolved those issues by now."
Some students though did not seem to have a problem. "I have yet to have an issue registering, but it is rough seeing so many other people have problems," senior Cathryn Sciattara said. "I think that this needs to be looked into because this could truly affect students trying to graduate."
"We didn't anticipate it," Redford said during a phone interview. She said the problem came down to memory, of which there was not enough to handle the additional students on the system. She said myLongwood works fine when students use it to take care of regular business on a daily basis, but with registration, the amount of users on the channels at once was too much.
The Office of Information and Instructional Technology Services (IITS) ordered two additional GB of memory to help fix the problem. They hoped to have the problem fixed by Friday morning, but it was not the case. Redford said part of that problem was shipping, something beyond the department's control. She said the memory was not something they had felt the need for, but due to the problems, decided it was the best option when dealing with a large number of users on the system. "We really thought we had the resources, but we did not," said Redford.
To further explain the issue, Dr. Frank Moore, vice president of Information & Instructional Technology Series and chief information officer, sent an email to all Longwood University students on Friday stating, "The Office of Information & Instructional Technology Services sincerely apologizes to all Longwood students who experienced difficulties with registering for classes this week."
To fix the issue, myLongwood was down from 3-5 p.m. Friday while the upgrade took place. This only affected myLongwood while other services such as email remained completely functional.
When students log in now to the myLongwood portal, they will see a link under the Student tab's "Student Quick Link" box entitled "Registration Direct." Though this move will not repair everything, it currently works by bypassing one of the channels and will hopefully leave out an extra step that may require additional memory.
Redford said Monday's registration, for sophomores "went off without a hitch." Additionally, more memory was installed this week to help with the problem. Redford said hundreds of students were registered within the first few minutes. The most recent upgrade, an additional 4 GB upgrade, maxed out the server. This simply means it was the maximum amount of memory to put into the server.
Redford said even though there were some delays for the first two registration sessions, all students seemed to be registered adequately.
