Students who attended the involvement fair last week may have a difficult time accessing the Web site of their club or organization of choice because of continuing problems with the Student Activity Server.

Ryan Bagwell (senior-music) knows first hand how frustrating it can be when the Student Activity Server goes down.

"I think the problem started back in September," Bagwell said. "It goes down multiple times a week."

Bagwell is involved with the Penn State International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE), and is responsible for directing an annual festival that showcases the talents of high school jazz bands. Magazine ads in musical publications instruct interested jazz bands to view IAJE's Web page to apply and to find more information about the program.

Because the server is frequently out of order, IAJE members feel as though they are losing a significant number of interested high schools.

"To us especially, it's been a problem," Bagwell said. "Because the site's been down, it's affecting people's ability to respond to our ads."

Craig Henninger, network analyst for the Office of Student Affairs, said that the problems with the Student Activity Server are more complicated than students realize.

"As far as connectivity to the server itself, it's not the problem," Henninger said. He added that the server has been updated three times in the last two years.

All of the individual Web pages of Penn State's 500-plus student clubs and organizations are stored within the Center for Academic Computing's hard drive.

Currently managed by students, the server that accesses and runs these pages is located in a different building and utilizes different software than the CAC lab systems.

The Student Activity Server has not worked well lately because it is run from these two different locations with two different units of software.

"There seems to be some kind of contention between the software," Henninger said.

Special-case Web pages, or those that include special scripts or forms, such as automatic response forms, can also crash the system if the wrong executing instructions are used to create the page.

Although Henninger and his staff review and try to correct some Web pages with programming information that can present problems for the server, every so often a page will be posted with the components capable of crashing the system.

"We're working on it," Henninger said.

A member of the Cycling Club, Kevin Gombotz (senior-mechanical engineering) has also experienced problems with accessing his club's site on the Student Activity Server. Gombotz mainly uses the Cycling Club's Web site, which provides schedules and member information, to contact other group members.

"Almost 50 percent of the time I go to check someone's phone number, the server's down," he said.

Henninger said the university is aware of the problem and is trying to solve it.

"I don't want students to think it's being ignored, because it' s not," Henninger said. "Funding hasn't been accrued to get it done yet; we're trying to get funding from UPAC (University Park Allocations Committee)."