Ferris State Network Petition

We, as students and users of Ferris State University's campus network, are tired of it's shortcomings and demand urgent changes be made. The network fails to meet our needs as an educational tool, as well as a recreational resource. We feel this in due to a poor administration of the network and poor decisions by the University as a whole in regards to the network.

Ferris is growing ever more reliant upon the network and Internet, and due to it's failure to provide us with a stable connection we as users suffer. We use the campus network to register for classes, submit assignments, take online classes, communicate with professors and others, and reach the outside world.

The campus network has suffered a great deal of performance and stability blows at the hands of several new technologies, all falsely proclaimed to cure out network woes. Perfigo SmartEnforcer was mandated on all PCs starting this last fall, and has become the source of more problems than benefits--as it constantly malfunctions and blocks all attempts to use the network or internet. It has caused great problems for network usage, an example would be when the network was down the day before class registration; which prevented students from researching the call numbers for the classes they would be signing up for in the morning.

Another example of poor decision-making on behalf of the network administration is evidenced by the physical layout of the network. Our network spans campus, yet is all bottlenecked through a single router to the outside world. A proper network of this size would involve the use of several routers scattered throughout campus, to break the network into smaller portions and increase performance. Rather than doing this the network administration has chosen to implement very expensive "smart" switches which poorly mimick the benefits of a router.

It seems ever-obvious that attempts to improve the network have failed miserably. The network is now broken and in a near non-functional status. The root of these problems seems to be in poor attempts to stop file-sharing. While we do not disagree with the need to stop illegal activity on our network, we do feel priority needs to be placed first on having a functional network.