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Newsletter 14, March 1997 |
Network Infrastructure Development
Several areas of the network infrastructure are under active development, including the updating of building cabling (to a structured cabling standard known as “Category 5”) together with the installation of fibre-optic based trunks between and within buildings.
The new cabling infrastructure will allow us to carry the high-speed networking standards which are now emerging.
Specific projects which will come to fruition in the near future include:
The Campus Network Team now has on-site cover Monday–Friday at Beckett Park during term time. This will allow us to respond quickly to some problems on this campus without the need to wait for staff to travel from City Campus. Please note, however, that Beckett Park cover is still co-ordinated from the City Campus office, and that all queries and faults should be referred there as usual.
In order to help us deal with your networking problems as quickly as possible, we would like to remind you of the reporting procedure.
All Network faults should be reported to:
| extn 5964 (direct dial 283 5964) or fax extn 5962 (direct dial 283 5962) |
The fault reporting lines are covered
| Monday–Thursday | 08:30–17:30 | ||
| Friday | 08:30–16:00 |
The Postoffice moves are finished, although obviously individuals will move department/faculty occasionally. Please let me know if you are moving, including any system groups you are part of.
If you clear your personal address book of old addresses and rebuild groups, they should now be stable (apart from odd individual moves as mentioned above). See below for add-on utilities you can use to help with this.
All staff now have a group on their own Postoffice consisting of all users with the relevant 3-letter code (e.g. LSS - All Staff), and other subgroups of these are being set up as requested (within reason!). These groups are only visible on the Postoffice containing the staff concerned. If you think you should be in a group, or that a group is otherwise inaccurate, please contact the authority for that group — these are listed in shared folders.
Microsoft provides several extensions for Windows Mail users; particularly useful are “Report mail file size information” and “Synchronize personal address book”. See your usual computing support person (from Computing Services, MIS, or your own department) if you would like to be able to use them. More information about them is in Shared Folders.
These are folders which can be viewed by everyone on a Postoffice. To read them, select View, Shared Folders from the Windows mail menu. Remember to go back to View, Private Folders afterwards.
CES are using shared folders for information of interest to their faculty.
For help, advice or more information, please contact me (extn 3070).
Use of the Internet, primarily to access the World-Wide Web, is becoming increasingly important, and this is reflected by the steadily increasing demand placed upon our Web proxy service.
At LMU, all information from the Web is retrieved by a proxy server; this is tuned to make the best use of the Internet, and deliver pages as quickly as possible by using a disk cache to hold frequently-requested pages. The first time a page is requested, the response may be slow thanks to very busy Internet links (regional, national or international) and slow, busy or overloaded servers. Subsequent requests for the same page will be much faster because, unless the page has been modified, the proxy can deliver the page from its disk cache.
The current cache holds around 250,000 Web objects occupying up to 3Gbytes of disk space. In addition, the Web browser (Netscape) will hold some frequently-requested pages on the PC’s disk which, in some cases, reduces delays even further. Using this mechanism, many pages can be delivered in a few seconds.
When first introduced,
using spare server capacity and accessible
from just fifteen stations or so, the proxy server handled about
7,000 requests a month. We now have almost 500 stations able to
access the dedicated proxy server, which can now be expected to
handle over 10,000 requests per hour — or over 100,000 a
day. The total number of requests per month has now exceeded 2
million.
The adjacent graph displays the requests serviced by the proxy server during 1996. It shows how many requests were cached (delivered from the server’s disk), how many were proxied (retrieved from the Internet), and how many were interrupted by the user before completion.
We have a constant investment in time and resources to ensure that the proxy service continues to run as efficiently as possible. We are currently looking at increasing the cache to 6Gbytes and providing fallback servers to maintain the service should the primary server ever fail.
The development of the University’s web site continues apace with the introduction of an Intranet service. This is, in effect, a Campus-Wide Information Service, available only to people connected via the University network. Intranet-only documents are placed in a separate area on the web server, so that they cannot be accessed by “outsiders”. Documents that form part of the promotional side of the web site (i.e. the Internet service) are also available as part of the Intranet service.
Linked to this is the rolling programme of Netscape Navigator 3.0 upgrades and installations. If you don’t yet have Netscape, you can load the software on to your PC by logging in to an appropriate Novell server (MIS1 for admin staff, CSU-INST1 for City staff, CSU-INST2 for Beckett Park staff). This is what you need to do:
The PC will now download the Netscape software and install it into a Windows group called Netscape. When this has finished, the PC will reboot itself and the software will be available the next time you go into Windows.
This will allow any member of staff within the university access to the University’s web site. It will not provide access to the World-Wide Web, as this needs further authorization.
165 users looked at our web site on Christmas Day 1996. Sad, but true.
As you will probably be aware, there has long been a need for staff and students to be able to access the Internet and JANET from home, and thereby a means of promoting home working and a more flexible working environment. This is now available: U-NET and UKERNA (the organization that runs JANET, the network linking the UK Universities together) can now provide two classes of service to the Internet.
If you want a service that allows fast dial-up access to JANET, choose JCS. If your interest is in exploring and using the wider Internet, then the FIS service is for you. The FIS service costs £94 (£80 excluding VAT) and the JCS costs £68.15 (£58 excluding VAT) for twelve months’ access. These prices are only available to bona fide students and staff.
Please contact your nearest Computing Services Help Desk for further information.