Yoda:  "The Dark Side of the Force is with this one strong..."

After several configuration tweaks, the academic network situation has
improved significantly but the rotund soprano has not yet completed
her closing aria.  (With apologies to the English department, "It
ain't over 'til it's over").

Overall performance was acceptable today, but there are still periods
of unresponsiveness lasting some 5-10 minutes spaced apart by several
hours.  There are two leading suspects currently under investigation:

* a hardware problem with cabling, router interface, or the router
  itself, and
* a malicious hacker in one of the student labs or library

To address the first issue, it may be necessary to exchange hardware
in the router to see if the problem follows the interface or remains
with the network segment.  This may cause some disruption possibly
necessitating a reboot of your system to regain connectivity.  I will
post advance notice if this action is required.

To address the second issue, we are monitoring traffic counts for all
stations on the academic segments looking for suspicious activity.
As of this writing, nothing terribly interesting has been uncovered.

In summary, we're getting there but there still may be some periods of
intermittent connectivity.  Please be patient and just retry any aborted
connections in a few minutes.  I have notified our local Cisco
engineer of our situation and he is going to escalate the priority of
our case internally to bring in "the big guns" to investigate.

May the force be with you/us :-)

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>