Many Iowa State students and faculty have been experiencing difficulties logging onto the ISU telnet system in order to send and retrieve electronic mail.

Slowness of the system and inability to log on are some of the most complained about problems.

Doug Marchik, a freshman in computer science and a frequent e-mail user, said the e-mail system is “lousy” because it never works.

“You get on the computer and a message repeats over and over that the system is too busy,” Marchik said. “You end up waiting an hour and you still don’t get on.”

When the system is too busy, a message will appear on the screen stating, “This system is too busy for more users. Waiting a bit.”

The message will appear several more times until it finally states, “Please try another [server] or try again later.”

Frank Poduska, an employee at the User Services Office in Durham Center, said when the message stating, “Too busy for more users” appears on the screen, the connection will stay open in an attempt to let incoming users log on to the system.

“This is why the message of ‘waiting a bit’ will appear,” he said.

Many of the problems occur because the servers, which connect users to the system, have a maximum number of users they can serve at once, Poduska said.

ISU has 33 servers including 17 college level servers, six general access servers and 10 file servers, Poduska said. Each system has load limits. No more than 64 users can be connected to a server at one time, he said.

There is an on-going effort to improve the e-mail system, Poduska said.

“It’s difficult to make any one machine move faster,” he said. “We at the computer center intend to add three more [servers] to the general access.”

Poduska said most of the complaints about slow connections are coming from students who are using the general access servers. The addition of three more general access servers should help to increase the connection speed on these servers, he said.

However, Poduska said when students are using Vincent, they should use college level servers rather than general access servers because there are more of them.

He also recommended using the servers at off-peak times. The busiest times for using Vincent are in the morning between 8 a.m. and 9, and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Poduska said.

“If [students and faculty] would use Eudora to check their e-mail, it would be much faster.”

Eudora is a commercial program used for checking e-mail. It is available in most computer labs on campus.