Technology@Wooster

The College recently signed an agreement with NTI Group to utilitize their Connect-ED emergency notification service.  This service will allow each student, faculty member and staff member to register multiple email addresses and telephone numbers (including cell phone numbers) to receive emergency notifications. College administrators will then use the service to quickly direct emergency messages via email, text message and telephone to those who have registered. In signing the agreement, the College becomes the fifth member of the Ohio Five consortium to engage the Connect-ED service.

Implementation will get underway early in the spring semester. The first step will be to solicit the relevant telephone numbers and email addresses from members of the Wooster community. The implementation will be overseen by the Emergency Response Steering Committee headed by Dean of Students Kurt Holmes. One of the challenges we face in the implementation is organizing our use of the service in ways that accommodate the College’s telephone and email systems effectively.

Last summer, IT implemented a network access control (NAC) system in all student residential spaces.  The NAC is designed to prevent computers that are infected with viruses or worms and computers that are vulnerable to such infections from connecting to the campus network.  This will prevent the spread of infection and help to ensure that the campus network and other IT resources operate effectively.

When students arrived on campus at the beginning of the fall semester and plugged a computer into a network jack, the NAC required that the student authenticate and register the computer. Following registration, a software agent was installed on the student’s computer. This agent scanned the computer for infection and vulnerabilities. If infections or vulnerabilities were detected, the student was directed to the appropriate IT resource for assistance. During that initial semester of the NAC’s operation, infected or vulnerable computers were not prevented from accessing the campus network. This was done to promote a smooth implementation of the NAC. From now on, student computers found to be infected or vulnerable to infection will be prevented from accessing the campus network. Students with infected or vulnerable computers will be directed to the appropriate resource for assistance.

Additional information about the NAC can be found in the following locations. Questions about the NAC should be addressed to the student help desk at xHELP (x4357).

• Network Access Control Set to Debut
• Network Access Control Implementation Set
• Network Services & Wireless Networking

IT has committed to extending wireless network access to Armington, Holden and Stevenson Halls over the upcoming summer. These three residence halls have been chosen because their existing infrastruture will most readily support the wireless service. Additional halls may be added to this list, but IT is unable to make additional commitments at this time. IT plans to schedule installation in additional residence halls once the budgeting process for next fiscal year is complete. Prior to extending access to these three residence halls, IT will upgrade the central wireless network infrastructure.

Among residence halls, wireless service is currently only available in Luce. The wireless service is also available in all academic buildings, Lowry Center, Galpin Hall, and the Douglas Quad.

Additional information will be posted to the blog as it becomes available.

In an effort to increase service to member institutions OarNET, the College’s internet service provider, will be performing maintenance 11/21/2007 between 12:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. Connectivity issues are expected when connecting to sites on Internet2. Internet and IntraOhio connections are not expected to be interrupted.

We regret any inconvenience this important service may cause.

Over the course of Thursday and Friday, September 13th and 14th, the College experienced intermittent network difficulties. These difficulties impacted access to resources on the campus network as well as resources on the internet. These problems were tracked to a small number of personal computers infected with some type of virus. The virus was, in each case, generating a tremendous amount of network traffic. This traffic significantly degraded network performance. These computers were removed from the network at approximately 5:00 Friday afternoon. Following the removal network performance returned to normal. IT hopes to examine the infected machines to ascertain the nature of the infection. We regret any inconvenience the network difficulties may have caused.

The campus is currently experiencing an unplanned cable TV system outage. Technicians are currently working to replace failed parts. We hope to have this problem corrected by 5:00 this evening and regret any inconvenience this outage may cause.

As announced back in November, IT will implement a network access control (NAC) solution in all student residential spaces effective with the beginning of the 07-08 academic year. The NAC is designed to prevent computers that are infected with viruses or worms and computers that are vulnerable to infection from connecting to the campus network. This will prevent the spread of infection and help to ensure that the campus network and other IT resources operate effectively.

When students arrive on campus and plug a computer into a network jack, the NAC will require that the student authenticate and register the computer. Following registration, a software agent will be installed on the student’s computer. This software agent will scan the student’s computer for infection and vulnerabilities. If infections or vulnerabilities are detected, the student will be directed to the appropriate resource for assistance. During the first two weeks of the fall semester, student computers found to have infections or vulnerabilities will still be allowed to connect to the campus network. Thereafter, network access will be denied to such computers until the infections or vulnerabilities are addressed. Students bringing multiple computers to campus will have to register each machine individually.

Gaming devices and IP telephones are permitted on the network, but require setup by IT. To initiate this setup, send an email with the device type and the device’s MAC address to it-nac@wooster.edu. Setup should be complete within two business days. Hubs, routers, switches and wireless access points will not function on the network. Questions can be addressed to the student help desk at xHELP (x4357).

On Wednesday May 16^th electric service to the campus will be shut off at 5:30PM with service returning approximately 9:30PM. To allow for an orderly shutdown IT will begin taking services offline at 4:15PM. Services will be brought down in the following order at the approximate times listed:

· 4:15PM Legacy System – Reflection, and Insight

· 4:30PM ERP System – Datatel Client, Scotweb, Safari, FRX, ProSystem FX, QuickBooks, TMA, ADP and Wintegrate.

· 4:40PM Email System – GroupWise Client, Scotmail, Alumni Mail and POP and IMAP accounts.

· 4:50PM POS and Access Servers – Best, CBord, FoodPro, Booklog, and Odyssey

· 5:00PM File Servers – Facultyserv, Staffserv, Studentserv, COWVideoserv, and COWServer

· 5:10PM Single purpose servers – MaxTix, Woodle, Blogs, MDID, WIKI’s, podcast, Pharos printing, RADIUS, WebServer, Pages Server, BlackBerry Server, FileMaker Pro, Key server, DNS, VPN, DHCP servers.

· 5:10PM Internet Access

After electrical service is restored, IT staff will be onsite to restore IT services. Services will return in the reverse order they were brought down.

IT recommends that all users logout of all applications and shut down all desktop computers, printers, fax machines and copy machines Wednesday as close to 4:30PM as possible to avoid issues related to improper shutdown.

This service outage will not affect phone or voicemail service.

Vince DiScipio
Director Networks, Telecommunications and Systems

Over the last few weeks IT has been attempting to isolate the source of the slow printing to several of our public and departmental printers. We have recently moved the public printers behind a firewall to protect the printers from network traffic not intended for them. These steps have made a significant change in the speed at which those devices operate. User Services will be contacting individual departments to discuss the steps necessary to continue to move the devices to a protected network.

Vince DiScipio
Director Networks, Telecommunications and Systems

At 6:00 Tuesday morning we began a routine process to add disk space to the Faculty and Staff storage area. While adding the space we encountered a bug within IBM’s software on the storage server. This bug caused the existing space to become unreadable. We worked for several hours with support personnel from both IBM’s support partner and Novell’s support team to recover the data.

Late in the day Tuesday it became clear we would not be able to recover the existing data and initiated the process to restore the data from backup tapes. The total amount of information being pulled from the tapes and the recreation of the virtual server structure went well but was very time consuming.

The Student space was returned to operation on Tuesday, March 6th at 8:00 pm. There was no data loss on the student volume.

Faculty Space returned to full operation on Wednesday, March 7th at 8:00am. All files updated on the faculty volume between 2:00AM and 6:00AM Tuesday, March 6th are not in the restore.

Staff Space returned to full operation on Thursday, March 8th at 8:00am. All files updated on the straff volume between 2:00AM and 6:00AM Tuesday, March 6th are not in the restore.

Any data saved or modified on the Faculty and Staff volumes between 2:00AM and 6:00AM Tuesday, March 6th has been lost.

We will continue working with IBM over the next weeks to completely isolate the portion of the software that created the issue, and we will be updating the software on our storage server with the patched version.

Thanks for your patience and understanding during this service outage.

Vince Di Scipio
Director Networks, Telecommunications and Systems