Glendale Community College has since the start of the semester been experiencing sustained and substantial server technical difficulties.

Gecko the GCC server which provides palette accounts and stores student roaming profiles, has been disconnecting.

Gecko is divided into two servers that provide the palette profiles at GCC. The first server supports profiles that that begin with the letters A through J, while the second server supports profiles beginning with K through Z.

When one or both servers go down, all the palette accounts that are stored on the server are then unable to function.

“(Students) lose access to all of their personal resources,” said Jim Daugherty, director at the Innovation Center, “they can get into the network, they can access the programs, but they cannot get into the files they’ve stored.”

For students this means that cookies, word documents, and anything stored on the “H” drive (personal space on the GCC server) will be unavailable while the server is down.

Mike Aragon, a staff member at the innovations center, said, “the problem basically started when the semester started.”

Fixing the server difficulties, “takes a lot of trouble-shooting approaches. At this point, I don’t know if the exact problem is identified,” said Aragon.

“Most of our problem is support;” continued Aragon helping students work around the problem.”

Jim Hamilton, a computer technician in Hight Tech Center 1, said, “We did a hardware upgrade, and a software modification.” The software modification is not suspected to be the source of the problem.

“Up until classes started, this (problem) never happened. Otherwise we would’ve taken care of it, or at least had a week head start,” said Hamilton.

The Gecko server runs on Novell Netware, and other Novell users have reported similar problems.

On Feb. 2 Novell identified the problem as a bug in the software that conflicted with the palette. Novell then provided a software patch to remedy the server problem. The software patch installation began Feb. 5 at 10:00 p.m. and was completed Feb. 7 at 7:23 a.m.

According to a progress report from GCC Network Services as of Feb.7, “Gecko had been re-booted and was available for use again. All “H” drives and all other services should be functional.”