IT Services shared further details with the IT community about the network outage on September 25 at the IT Exchange meeting on October 10.
The September 25 network outage started just before 1:00 p.m. in the Biomedical and Physical Sciences (BPS) building where traffic containing millions of MAC addresses originated.
This traffic at BPS was processed by the Tier 1 network switches using a significant amount of memory. This caused a collapse-restore cycle that continued until after the Tier 1 switches were rebooted.
Logs were sent to MSU’s network vendor to help diagnose the problem.
The MSU network backbone was designed to automatically direct traffic around a full failure or break. The outage on September 25 was intermittent so the redundancy built into the network couldn’t activate. This outage was a random event, possibly a configuration issue of a computer, and can’t be fully prevented.
For more questions, contact the IT Services Support Desk at (517) 432-6200.
