SGA gathers MIX complaint list

Published: Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Updated: Tuesday, September 8, 2009 23:09

As students continue adjusting to the new version of MIX, West Virginia University’s Student Government Association is asking them to voice concerns through a blog on its Web site.

"We hope that the blog will help steer the Office of Information and Technology people in the right direction," said SGA Gov. Paul Kast. "I hope that OIT and the people who update MIX will see the blog and consider students’ opinions in how they’re going to fix MIX and update it even more."

The blog was started Aug. 26 when SGA Vice President Whitney Rae Peters wrote on the blog that SGA had heard a "MIXed array of praises and complaints" about the new system.

"It seems to be like hit or miss," she said. "If you have lots of problems, you have lots of problems, but some students think it’s the best thing that ever happened and they’ve had no problems."

Concerns range from issues with sending attachments, logging out of the system and sending and receiving e-mails, among others.

"Based on our understanding, the people at OIT thought the problems were ending, but we’ve not seen that from the students we’ve talked to," Peters said, adding that SGA members have a meeting with Mark Six, assistant director for System Administrations at OIT, to discuss the problems.

Most problems are already being worked on, Six said.

"Some of the stuff we’ve done is, we have more than doubled the number of Web servers in front of the e-mail from two to five," he said. "That let’s us handle a higher load of more concurrent users."

Peak hours for using MIX are between noon and 7 p.m., according to Six. Last year, 4,000 to 4,500 students would be logged in at one time, but this year, the highest number of students logged on since the upgrade has been more than 6,000.

"We added more resources to accommodate the user load," he said.

Firewalls are also causing problems with certain computers, Six said, especially for students using Windows.

"Students need to make sure they have wvu.edu as a trusted site, and make sure their firewall doesn’t need updated on their computer," he said.

Internet Explorer 8 is not yet supported by the new MIX system. The vendor, Sun Microsystems, has not released the date the browser will be compatible with MIX.

As for the time-out problem, Six said after adding web servers, the time-out is less frequent, but he noted that it still occurs.

"We’re working with the vendor to capture the traffic that’s going between the browser and server itself," he said.

Sun Microsystems is analyzing data to determine the cause of the log-outs.

Six said if students re-enter their password when the log-out screen appears, all work should be saved. Clicking other buttons will lessen the chance of work saving.

Six is running a debug mode on the server’s end to capture data for re-entering passwords, which slows the loading portion of the system because every click on the system is logged for data.

"Unfortunately I have to hurt you a little bit in order to help you," he said.

Though Six is unsure when all bugs will be out of the system, it is an ongoing project for OIT.