Access denied

Any college student knows the importance of a good Internet connection: AIM, music downloads, and the ever addicting Snood.

What about the more pressing uses of a high- speed Net connection? Grades anyone? What about registering for those things called classes? Oh. Campus Pipeline.

If you have tried to log on to this Fairfield sponsored site lately, you may be asking yourself why you even signed up to have yet another email account anyway.

Recently, Campus Pipeline has been experiencing technical difficulties.

Instead of checking classes, campus wide emails and some Fairfield 411, users were in for a nasty surprise-passwords and usernames did not match up. Now students must go to Computing and Networking Services to reset their Pipeline accounts.

“I have only had a few problems with my campus pipeline last year, but yesterday I logged on to find that my account and username had been disabled,” said Diedre Hassel, ’05.

In their defense for the faltering system, Computing and Networking Services are currently at work on updating Pipeline. However, they declined to comment definitely for this article.

For those of you who are able to log on to the account, there will be a listing of numbers to call in anticipation of future problems. There will also be an explanation of why there are these difficulties under the heading “Campus Pipeline Upgrade.”

According to Earl Whiskeyman, director of the Grad Program in Software engineering, “Campus pipeline is a great convenience for tracking student enrollment in courses and submitting grades. Its web mail features are also a great convenience when traveling.”

But if students are urged to use this miracle of modern technology, then why is the system faulty?

Pipeline popularity is apparently dwindling.

“Because of my frustration with Pipeline last year, I haven’t logged on all semester. I’m reluctant to email my students’ grades through Campus Pipeline, but now I have to,” said an exasperated Dr. Ben B. Halm.

“I always hand in a hard copy of the grades just in case,” said Diane Brosseau, a biology professor, who uses the Pipeline conservatively.

Hopefully, all the changes will be more conducive to students needs.

“It’s not the greatest thing ever, but it’s also not that bad. There’s just room for improvement,” said Kate Termine, ’04.