SOUTHEAST GETTING BUGS OUT OF NEW COMPUTER SYSTEM

A glitch in a new IBM operating system at Southeast Missouri State University knocked out the university's phone registration system early last week, and for part of Monday it forced students to rent books for the spring semester the old-fashioned way: by filling out a card.

The university purchased a new mainframe computer last year and waited until the Christmas break to install the new system because some disruption was anticipated. The system went live Jan. 3 and ran well for two or three hours before one of the online systems began crashing.

The system for registering for classes via phone was mostly down Jan. 3 and 4. Also affected was a program for looking at student records, which inconvenienced students who needed to see an adviser before they could register.

Tom Goodheart, a sophomore in the manufacturing, engineering and technology program at Southeast, said he took off work last Friday because registering in person works better for his major. When he arrived at the registrar's office at 11:30 a.m., he says, he was told the computer system was down and to try back later.

Goodheart said he tried to register again at noon Monday with no success. "They said the computers were down."

Don Krueger, director of computer services for the university, said the system has been primarily up since last Wednesday and is taken down periodically for testing.

Textbook rental for the new semester began Monday. During the morning, students had to fill out rental cards instead of using the computerized scanning system. "It was an inconvenience because they had to write it all down, but we haven't had lines," said Jan Chisman, manager of the Southeast bookstore. The first day of book rental usually is the busiest, she added.

Graduate students, who must purchase their books, couldn't put them on their university account because of the computer problem.

The systems the bookstore uses were running again by about noon Monday, said Krueger.

He said his department concentrated on getting the payroll out last week and making sure the mail system was working because millions of dollars in fees were coming in.

The registration system didn't work the first two days of last week unless the student called in after 5 p.m. "It was a big inconvenience," Krueger said.

The phone registration glitch was fixed by last Wednesday, he said.

"The main people affected were students, and that's a shame," Krueger said.

He said none of the problems was Y2K related.

Krueger had assumed the problem was in existing programs that weren't compatible with the new system. "Friday night or Saturday morning we narrowed in on what the bug was," he said. "It was in the operating system itself."

He said the culprit was an error-handling routine that was crashing the systems over minor problems.

"It took a long time to isolate what it was," he said.

At a university where there are 20,000 computers, more problems could arise once classes start.

"We haven't been up with all the systems. We could still get a , but I don't think so," Krueger said.