By Wei Wei Liu
Staff Writer

Since the start of the school year, students have experienced periodic problems with the Digital Locker System (DLS). Students are sometimes unable to access the system to upload homework, projects or other school-related work.

“The DLS has saved my life numerous times because whenever my teachers ask me to get something off of it to turn in, it always happens to be down,” junior Alex Cringle said.

DLS problems sometimes result in postponed due dates.
“I was trying to turn in my physics lab, but the server shut down. It gets really frustrating,” senior Jon Chang said.

In the particular case of the physics lab, the due date was postponed until students were able to access the DLS and submit their lab, according to Jon.

Technical Problems
However, there have only been isolated incidents when the DLS has been inaccessible throughout the entire school.

“There was one day when the server in Fremont, the company, went down for whatever reason,” said physics teacher Leo Florendo, one of the staff members in charge of the DLS on campus.

This glitch was resolved within a few hours by ACMA, the company that provides the DLS service. ACMA is quick to provide technical support for any potential problems.

“They’re the kind of company that still has the troubleshooting skills and the server skills…They’re very responsive,” physics teacher and DLS administrator Adam Randall said.

Networking and internal school problems constitute most DLS technical problems.

“The issues that we’ve had with the DLS have not been on the DLS server side. In the beginning of the year there were a lot of internal Los Altos High School network issues that didn’t allow the student network to contact the internet,” Randall said.

Early in the school year, a virus at school interfered with the DLS system.

“Several worms or viruses…were attacking the Los Altos High school network, and they were slowing down all kinds of…servers,” Randall said.

Networking issues directly associated with the school are caused by the connection between the school and the Santa Clara County Office of Education’s internet hub.

“[Our] school internet connection…goes through quite a complicated pipeline…If any one of those junction points between us and the several dozen or unknown number of routers and servers to the Santa Clara County office go down, we’re down,” Randall said.

User Problems
Most DLS problems are directly associated with user files, not with technical server issues, according to Randall and Florendo.

“From my experience and my class, a good 70 or 75 percent of the issues we’ve had with the DLS from its inception a year or two ago have been on the user side,” Randall said.

Possible user problems arise can result from invalid filenames.

If a student uses “any sort of nontraditional characters like an asterisk or a slash or a comma, either the DLS won’t accept the uploading,” Randall said.

PC computers (like the ones at school) add a “.doc” or a “.xls” to the ends of their filenames, whereas Mac computers do not. These discrepancies between the two operating systems can result in a file that is unable to be uploaded or downloaded, according to Randall.

Help for students
Regardless of possible errors, technical or user, there is help available for students.

“There are three managers: Mr. Florendo, Mr. Randall, Mr. Seran, who will troubleshoot students’ problems specifically with the passwords or usernames…so there’s hopefully lots of support for students,” Randall said.