The information highway can become clogged at times, and a web page is not immune to the effects. A web page can be completely shut down when people send it hundreds of requests to the same Internet address every second. Making it impossible for anyone to access the page.

Sly Upah, a systems analyst for the Computational Center, said ISU web pages have not had that kind of problem yet.

He added that the university web pages are protected. At the computational center, the log files are monitored for each server.

“The homepages on the www.public are protected by the same mechanism as users’ files are in Project Vincent (via the file protection scheme on the Andrew File System (AFS)).

“There isn’t much chance of homepages being lost unless a user has set their file protections incorrectly, and this won’t happen if the instructions that are published online are followed for registering and setting up pages,” Upah said.

Web pages are made to be read-only files for the web surfer and write-only for the web page author.

Jim Schlosser, the head of system support at the computer science department, said the computer science department has an implementation to protect its pages as well. He said the department had several users who accessed a page often, but it was due to the popularity of the page.

If the page is damaged, Upah said the files are recoverable via the “afsbackup” command on Project Vincent. This allows users to retrieve files from the previous day.

Schlosser said possible reasons for wanting to shut down web pages can be due to pranks such as mail bombing and corporate sabotage.

A company may advertise a sales deal on the web for one of its products. A competitor could then flood the page’s server with requests to prevent any other users from trying to access the page.

Users who cannot get into a page after multiple attempts will very likely give up, Schlosser said. Shutting down the page could be to a competitor’s advantage.