Around 10 a.m. Friday, an error message showed up on the server for many degree audits.

“Degree audits are a check of courses toward graduation; they tell students what they still have to take.” said Sue Harvey, registrar.

An ITS employee said this problem was resolved within a couple of hours.

Students were receiving error messages that said the degree was nonexistent.

This was happening for both INB (Internet Native Banner) and Self Service.

Chat Chatterji, assistant vice president for Information Technology Services at Eastern, said there are two ways to access Banner.

One requires running in “Native mode,” which is running part of the Banner system on a desktop computer.

The other, called “self service,” is more generic; it runs under the control of Web pages and “doesn’t require anything proprietary running on your desktop computer,” Chatterji said.

“Most students access information (through self service),” he said.

Chatterji works with technical aspects of the server.

The server, which was down because of memory errors, was unable to

supply the information to the degree audit reporting system module.

“It was a hardware problem. There were memory errors in the computer (server) which supplied the data for DARS,” Chatterji said. “The memory hardware was replaced, and the system was back on line in about an hour. This type of problem is infrequent – but it does happen.”

Ashley Mefford may be reached at 581-7945 or at almefford@eiu.edu.