U. Southern Mississippi survives Y2K turnover Updated 12:00 PM ET January 12, 2000

By Contina Quinn, The Student Printz, U. Southern Mississippi

(U-WIRE) HATTIESBURG, Miss. -- After spending some $3 million on Y2K related issues, University of Southern Mississippi survived.

"The Y2K issues we faced were related to minor glitches in the software," said John McGowan," USM's chief technology officer. "When we post transactions, we will see some of those problems."

McGowan said teams of sometimes 30 people were on site during the holidays.

He said USM had no serious Y2K issues. There were some network issues, because everything was powered down to prevent computers from shutting down in the case of power outages.

McGowan said there have been minor glitches in the student administration system, because the software has not been converted to PeopleSoft. He said these problems were fixed easily. USM still has systems that are not Y2K compliant. These systems are not mission critical. He said there was a problem related to a server in Continuing Education, because it was running an older version of an operating system.

Students wishing to access the Internet through USM's ocean will no longer be able to do so, because the PPP connection is not Y2K compliant. "We decided we're not going to replace that system, because we're upgrading modem banks on the switch we bought to provide other services."

This voice/data switch provides telephone features such as voice mail, call forwarding and wake-up calls. Toward the end of the semester caller ID should be added. Users assessing the Internet off campus may, however, use any Internet Service Provider such as USM's Eagle Connection to get online. "

It's (Eagle Connection) more reasonable than other services," said Tonia Seymour, Office of Technology Resources' customer service representative.

One hundred twenty hours are available for $9.95 a month. Added hours are billed at 50 cents an hour. Karen Reidenbach, OTR business officer, said additional trunk lines were also added to campus.

"We have been monitoring the traffic since we installed those added trunk lines," Reidenbach said.

"So far we haven't experienced any more trouble with busy signals. The equipment allows us to monitor traffic when it looks like the lines are filling up again. Then we'll act accordingly.

(C) 2000 The Student Printz via U-WIRE http://news.excite.com/news/uw/000112/tech-107

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), January 17, 2000