May 1, 2014

Today Ming did a quick recap of the responsibilities of both Site Managers and Student Help Desk. I took attendance and made sure someone on the floor had something to do.

One interesting thing that happened today was that a user came up to the front desk and asked if there was another support team other than TLT. I was very confused as to what he was talking about so I calmly asked him what particular issue he had so we can better direct him to the right “support” team. His issue was that he was unable to directly download shared files to his computer through dropbox. We asked if he used different browsers to make sure the issue is not due to the browser. He said he did and he also contacted dropbox and they said it was a network issue on his side.

This was a strange one. So Ming and I tried to download a shared file from dropbox directly on both the Mac and the Windows computer. It was not possible. If it was a network issue, client support will be able to help explain the issue to the user. He then asked where they are located and we told him the directions to where to find client support on the 5th floor.

Then Parth passed by and I told him about the situation. He was very interested in the situation so he decided to try it out in the Teaching Learning Lab (TLL). According to Parth, the TLL is on a different network. I guess with all the projects they do, I wouldn’t be surprised. He tried directly downloading the file I tried to download and it worked.

He asked Paul St. Denis for some insight on this issue. Paul explained that the behavior of the way we were unable to do a direct download is that Stony Brook Network is unable to recognize the link. There were a lot of terms and ideas that I was not familiar but what I concluded that it would be stony brook network. However there is nothing wrong per-se it is just that the network is unable to recognize the proxy that is unique to drop box so the link would constantly loop until it times out.