The largest residential hall on Nova Southeastern University’s campus, Mako Hall, had reports of issues with the doors not opening and Sharkcards not allowing entry into the building on April 7.
Jim Lambe, the associate director of communications and technology of Public Safety, oversees the door functions on buildings on campus from a programming standpoint. Lambe’s team had planned server maintenance from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on April 7.
At Mako Hall, each card reader connects to controllers that talk to the server through the network. When the network is turned off, it then relies on local memory. According to Lambe, the issue with Mako Hall’s doors comes from a mishap within the local memory. During the server maintenance, the network that contains all information is shut down, but there is supposed to be a local memory that has the same information.
“When the server goes down, the local memory is still supposed to remember that a specific student has access to the building,” said Lambe. “For some reason, at Mako Hall, all the controllers dumped their local memory when they lost connection with the server. This created an inconvenience factor for all the residents there.”
Going forward, Lambe mentions that there is now a plan in place to make sure that the event on April 7 doesn’t repeat itself. He says that the issue is still being troubleshooted further to understand it in detail due to it only occurring at Mako Hall.
“We regret that there was an inconvenience, and ideally, that should not have happened,” said Lambe. “The good thing is that we’ve identified the issue and there is now a workaround in place.”
The door issues extend further than just Mako Hall. The Louis W. Parker Physical Sciences Center, better known as the Parker building, is also having an issue with their doors. At times, the sliding doors in the Parker Building need to be propped open due to them not functioning properly.
Jimmy Ricci, Public Safety’s associate director of physical security specializing in locksmith operations, is familiar with the situation. Ricci said that people pushing the doors open is the most likely reason for this issue.
“Sometimes people will push the sliding doors and they go off the track,” said Ricci. “It’s a matter of realigning the doors back on the track and getting them to re-set in place.”
The doors may have also been affected by the maintenance, according to Ricci. Each building has a schedule of when doors are supposed to open. The server’s downtime could have also possibly affected the Parker building.
“When the server is down, there are certain door schedules that occur outside of the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.,” said Ricci. “For some reason, there could’ve been a schedule that was occurring in that time frame, and that could’ve been possibly impacted by the server being down.”
