Some juniors scheduled to register for classes Monday morning were unable to do so due to a technical malfunction.
Students using wireless networks other than Duke’s were prevented from logging into ACES, which underwent a redesign last year, and found they could not enroll in classes.
“We attribute postponement of this morning’s registration for juniors to an internal problem with the authentication service (the service that allows only authorized people access to certain applications), which prevented some users outside the Duke network—people off campus—from authenticating to ACES,” Klara Jelinkova, assistant vice president of shared services and infrastructure, wrote in an e-mail. “[The Office of Information Technology] has implemented a permanent workaround to alleviate this problem; the root cause is under investigation.”
OIT was immediately notified of the problem. Juniors scheduled to register then received an email from OIT about five minutes before the registration window opened, informing them of the issue, junior Ben Xie said.
“I woke up at 6:45 [a.m.] and I couldn’t log on,” Xie said. “But then I got an e-mail 10 minutes later, so it was just ten minutes of trying to figure out what to do.”
As a result of the malfunction, registration windows for all unregistered students have been pushed back one day, including those for students at the School of Law and the Fuqua School of Business.
Students were informed of the postponement in an e-mail at approximately 3:30 p.m. Monday.
“Our philosophy has always been that if a portion of the students eligible for a particular window are unable to access registration because of some system or network issues, then we will delay registration so no one receives an unfair advantage in accessing classes because of technical issues,” University Registrar Bruce Cunningham wrote in an e-mail.
The delay is a slight inconvenience to students who were unable to register in their scheduled window.
“It’s kind of a pain that I have to wake up at 7 a.m. again, but I have to register,” Xie said.
Cunningham said he first became aware of problems with the authentication service late Sunday afternoon, but was informed that they had been resolved along with other server issues. He added that the University continued to receive questions from off-campus students who could not access ACES, particularly students who are studying abroad.
“The problem was with people coming in from the outside. We first recognized this with people in Europe—the only fair thing to do was postpone,” said Steve O’Donnell, OIT’s senior communications strategist.
Junior Cami Parrish, who is studying abroad in Sydney, said when she tried to log into ACES, she received an error message that read “This page cannot be loaded.”
“Around two hours before registration, a lot of students I know who are currently abroad were guessing that it was a problem for anyone not in the U.S.,” Parrish wrote in an e-mail. “I didn’t officially know it was a technical difficulty until I got an e-mail from the Registrar about five minutes before scheduled registration.”
Smooth registration would certainly make things easier for everyone, Parrish added.
“I feel inconvenienced,” she said. “My parents probably feel more inconvenienced since I woke them up at 6:30 a.m. to register me.”
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