For most students, the Internet is such a pervasive part of life that it’s hard to imagine a day without it.
- Angela Cesere
- Wolverine Access provides students with a way to pay bills, check on financial aid disbursement, schedule classes and review grades and transcripts. But the University closes the important website for several hours each day. During these times, system adm
With everything from news and homework assignments to Facebook profiles and YouTube videos, it seems as though the Web is all-powerful. It has information on everything, and best of all, it’s always available.
That’s why it comes as a surprise to most students that Wolverine Access, one of the University’s most important online services, closes each weeknight and for most of the weekend.
The website is a portal for students to pay bills, check on financial aid disbursement, schedule classes and review grades and transcripts.
It can be a major inconvenience to find out at 2 a.m. that the page is closed until 7:30 the next morning.
There are two reasons for the daily shut-down, according to staff from Administrative Information Services and the Residential Computing staff.
First, it allows system administrators to repair and maintain the huge amounts of data that can be accessed with Wolverine Access.
Technicians can fix bugs, update software or upgrade hardware while the website is closed.
Also, each day a “snapshot” is taken to backup all the information stored on the website.
Because it is such a huge repository of valuable information – including financial aid, payment data, class schedules, grades and accumulated credit hours – losing files to computer problems would be catastrophic. Each day when the website closes, this information is backed up and stored safely.
That means that if the system was somehow compromised and the Wolverine Access server corrupted, system administrators could restore all of the data using the backup files.
Wolverine Access is closed from 4 to 7 a.m. Tuesday through Friday, Saturdays from 10:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. and from 2 to 7:30 a.m. on Monday.
JAKE HOLMES
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