 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
NEWS
FEATUREFROM THE CIOFYI
KUDOS TO . . .CONTACTSNEWSCampus Wireless Access Now Requires UMBC Login While UMBC's wireless network access provides considerable freedom, it also brings greater security concerns since anyone can use it--until now. OIT has been testing a wireless authentication system during Spring 2004 in UMBC's residential wireless network and adopted the same system for the entire campus on August 18, 2004. If you use UMBC's wireless network, you'll be prompted to login with your UMBC userid & password. For more information, visit http://www.umbc.edu/oit/sans/desktopsupport/vernier. If you have questions or problems please contact the OIT helpdesk at helpdesk@umbc.edu or 410-455-3838. Be Cautious About Installing Microsoft's Windowx XP Service Pack 2 On August 9, OIT issued a campus-wide announcement about concerns with Microsoft's Windows XP "service pack 2" (SP2). Unfortunately, once installed, SP2 automatically turns on certain security features like the Windows XP firewall. Our testing of the Beta release shows that Service Pack 2 breaks Novell printing, Microsoft's Systems Management Server and possibly parts of Peoplesoft. It is very important that UMBC faculty and staff NOT install this service pack for Windows XP. Most Windows machines on campus are using OIT's Software Update Services (SUS) to receive patches like this one. These patches are only released once OIT has had the opportunity to test them for potential compatibility issues. If you are currently on Active Directory then you are receiving your patches in this manner, and should be fine. If you are currently using a home computer with a cable or DSL broadband connection--but don't have a hardware or software based firewall installed--then you may want to contact your Internet Service Provider (ISP) about installing SP2, which includes a software-based firewall.
Active Directory Install Begins Novell Phase Out The ability to manage desktops efficiently and quickly has become increasingly critical as more Internet Worms, Viruses and Microsoft vulnerabilities are released daily. Without the ability to deploy fixes quickly we are more susceptible to a vulnerability that could affect the entire campus and potentially bring work to a halt. To help, OIT’s Desktop Support staff began visiting campus offices in June to update all Windows machines with the most recent versions of McAfee, the Virtual Private Network (VPN) client and most importantly the Microsoft Active Directory environment which will eventually replace our Novell network. While active directory is not a magic bullet it does provide OIT with the ability to remotely deploy solutions to campus machines in hours instead of days. This can mean the difference between a minor inconvenience and the entire campus effectively being shut down. By joining machines on campus into the Active Directory we gain the ability to manage Windows machines more efficiently than we ever have in the past. Active Directory provides OIT with the capability to use Microsoft’s Software Update Server (SUS) and System Management Server (SMS 2003). These two services in conjunction with active directory will provide OIT the ability to update critical patches remotely, adjust your antivirus software and much more without ever having to send someone out to interrupt your work. The good news is that this work should have no impact on you or your machine. If you are a Novell user you will continue to print and share files through Novell. If you have any questions regarding Active Directory, please contact Chris Milito, Desktop Support Coordinator at chrism@umbc.edu. -Mike Carlin OIT Installs MS Software Update System In late spring, OIT installled Microsoft's Software Update Services (SUS) which helps manages critical patches for known security vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems. When new critical Windows security patches are released by Microsoft, OIT will test and release them for distribution to UMBC-owned machines from our SUS server. Every day at 3 a.m. Windows machines running SUS will check for new patches and install them. If your machine is turned off at that hour it will check again 10 minutes after your next logon. Given Microsoft's recent release of several critical security patches, it is important that all Windows machines running Windows 2000 or higher receive the SUS settings. SUS will only work from within UMBC, so campus machines that do not login to Novell should visit the following site to installl SUS: http://www.umbc.edu/oit/sans/desktopsupport/sus. OIT Conducts Disaster Recovery Drill In late January, OITconducted an early morning disaster recovery drill. " We were tasked by the state auditors to create a disaster recovery plan," explained Mike Carlin, OIT Director of Infrastructure and Support. "[CIO] Jack [Suess] wanted a drill to evaluate the plan's effectiveness." Help Desk manager Anna Perez kicked off the drill at 9 a.m. by paging key personnel, alerting them to a critical situation in OIT's server room. The Help Desk routinely serves as OIT's eyes and ears, detecting potential disasters from customer calls and server monitoring systems and quickly relaying relevant information to appropriate staff members. Responding to the Help
Desk summons, OIT staffers entered the ECS building computer room
and discovered numerous "damaged" machines occupying the
top shelves of the facility's After assessing the damage and writing down which machines were affected, each OIT group was given several hours to develop a response. A combined meeting was held over lunch, according to Carlin. "We did that because everything affects one another -- we talked about ETAs and tried to look for holes." "Most of the servers that were hit were non-consequential because we have a lot of redundancy," explained Tim Craig, while noting that one particular "damaged" server required significant repairs with an estimated downtime of 1-2 days. "One of the home file servers was taken out. We used spare parts to create a new server and restore the user volumes from tape," said Craig. OIT's disaster recovery
drill not only reinforced group coordination, but served as the
impetus to expand a server list initially used by Craig and OIT's
Syscore group to an organization-wide Oracle database that catalogues
servers according to serial number, services, location, IP address
and dependancies. Craig explained that the server database -- which
is periodically printed and stored as hardcopy in the event of an
actual disaster -- has evolved from a simple Excel spreadsheet to
an online, access controlled repository that will soon be used by
OIT's LAN - Vergil Bushnell VPN Provided Additional Security for HP Users This month, UMBC staff will begin using the Virtual Private Network (VPN) client to connect to the HP. The VPN will provide a layer of security in addition to the normal username and password currently required. Once implemented HP users will first login to the VPN, creating an encrypted connection, and then into HP Reflection. This added security is a requirement of the last legislative audit, so the VPN client was installed by OIT staff this summer for customers using the HP and related administrative systems. Once deployed the client will need to be used each time the HP is used. Our next legislative audit is expected to occur this Fall. Prior to this visit all HP users will need to start using this client since OIT required it on August 26th, 2004. The good news for many of us is that by using the VPN, off-campus access to the HP will work once authenticated via the VPN. -Michael Carlin The staff of Classroom Technologies has been busy during the summer upgrading lecture halls, redesigning AV carts and building new media-equipped classrooms. Lecture Halls AV Carts Media-equipped Classrooms
LP Vinyl to CD -Victor Aulestia Business Systems and New Media Units Move Into New Space OIT's Business Systems group is finally in the loop--inside Hilltop Circle that is. After several years in the Technology Resource Center (TRC), the group that handles all of UMBC's production IT infrastructure systems including PeopleSoft and myUMBC moved into the 6th floor of the Admin. Bldg between January and March, after the Political Science and Policy Studies Departments moved into the new Public Policy Bldg. "It's great to finally have all of our staff together," says Joe King, manage of systems infrastructure, who has moved seven times in five years. "Now we can work collectively to solve campus problems." Manager of Database Technologies Todd Haddaway agrees and says the move has "made our work much more personable. We don't have to try to work through technical issues over the phone--though we'll miss the easy parking of TRC." Business Systems Director Joe Kirby is glad the move is behind him and appreciates the help of Physical Plant staff like Barry Riley and Marjorie Gill, who illustrate the "benefits of true team work." "Our new location has proved very beneficial as the synergy of working with all their peers has enhanced the work experience of all Business Systems staff," says Kirby, who looks forward to fewer meetings that "were a byproduct of [our] disjointed locations." Similarly, OIT's New Media Learning & Development unit moved from two locations in ACIV to the ECS 101 suite formerly occupied by the Chemical Engineering department, which is now in the ITE Building. The New Media staff has responsibility for Blackboard as well as training & support for campus web development, basic PeopleSoft functions and some desktop productivity applications. In addition, the New Media Studio handles departmental or grant-related Web, video, multimedia and streaming production projects on a cost-recovery basis. - John Fritz FEATUREInternet2 Connects
UMBC Faculty with New World Symphony, NASA On Thursday, March 18, dozens of universities and research organizations -- including UMBC -- celebrated "Internet2 Day" by simultaneously receiving and displaying an eight hour streaming video "megabroadcast." As an active I2 member organization, UMBC presented the megabroadcast to interested members of the campus community in the ECS 023 video conferencing facility. The event's coordinator, OIT streaming video specialist Paul Iwancio, gauged attendance at "about a dozen."
Besides running I2 Day at UMBC, Iwancio (affiliated with OIT's NewMedia division) recently participated in a "hands-on workshop" this past January devoted to "using I2 to videoconference music and other arts events." Hosted by the New World Symphony educational association, the workshop brought Iwancio and Anjan Shah (of UMBC's Music department) together with faculty and IT professionals representing universities ranging from Julliard to Columbia. Attendees of the Symphony workshop -- whether virtuoso or video specialist -- explored the emerging possibilities of real-time, multi-party collaboration offered by the I2 network. Iwancio, who's worked on videoconferencing at UMBC for eight years, recalled the challenges of setting up an ultimately successful I2 "virtual practice session" between a quartet of saxophonists (including Shah) located at different universities. "Through extensive testing before the actual session, we learned that one sax player could be the leader and the other sites could follow -- but they had to mute their sites to follow; otherwise the music got out of synch. Each site took a turn leading a composition and the others played along." While I2-linked universities rapidly realize (as Iwancio puts it) " opportunities for new collaboration and interaction" such as videoconferencing, the Abeline network is gradually changing the scope and pace of data gathering for a growing number of academic researchers. Since August 2002, UMBC Physics professor Larrabee Strow has been using I2 as a reliable, high-speed conduit to harvest data generated by an multi-million dollar infrared spectrometer onbaord NASA's orbiting AQUA satellite. Specifically, Strow uses the Unix "wget" utility to "download NASA satelllite data -- 30 gigabytes a day, every day," a continuous fount of raw information used to analyze global climate change. He explained that the rapid file transfers allowed by UMBC's I2 link enables him to download and archive satellite data from NASA's RAID server before it's rotated into tape storage "and almost impossible to get out." "Before the availability of high speed Internet, this kind of research was only done at the largest government installations," says Strow. Like many other I2 member schools, UMBC doesn't tap into Abilene (the nickname of I2's network backbone) directly. Currently, an OC3 connection ties UMBC to the Mid-Atlantic Gigapop (http://www.maxgigapop.net), which is linked to I2. UMBC's two-hop connection to I2 is on track for an upgrade, according to Mark Cather, head of OIT's Physical Networks group. "Within the next few months, we are going to get a fiber connection to BERNet," (http://www.usmd.edu/baltpop) said Cather. "The fiber connection to BERNet will run Gigabit Ethernet." FROM THE CIO
Here's What Changed While You Were Away As we prepare to start another academic year I wanted to give the community an update on changes you will see upon your return and also highlight ongoing developments. I am privileged to lead an organization that has a great staff and great leadership. While I have been focused primarily on PeopleSoft you will see that OIT continues to provide a quality technology infrastructure. One of the most visible changes faculty and students will see is that we have upgraded from Blackboard 5 to Blackboard 6. We continue to see increased usage with Blackboard and expect to have almost 500 courses utilizing it this fall (twice as many as 2 years ago). As part of this upgrade, OIT upgraded the hardware infrastructure that Blackboard utilizes and enhanced some of the software integration services we offer to the campus. For example, we are able to auto-create courses in Blackboard, auto-enroll students in the course, and provide options for integrating the Scantron exams into the Blackboard grade book. As we evolve Blackboard 6 you will see better integration with the UMBC portal and more services integrated into the Blackboard portal. A second initiative, though not as visible, is our work this past year focusing on enhancing IT security. As the risk of worms, viruses, and hacking continues to increase we have had to rethink and reengineer the way we provide IT services. Our goal is to make sure you have a safe computing environment in which to work or perform scholarship. Some of these projects are driven by State audit requirements but many of these are also something we feel are necessary to ensure that you can safely use your computer. Over the spring and summer we have implemented the following initiatives:
A third initiative has been focusing on our mail processing infrastructure. Because of Spam and email-based viruses we have been seeing tremendous increases in mail volumes. It is not uncommon to see UMBC process over 1 million messages in a single day! In addition, with the use of attachments now common we see much larger mail messages on average. We have turned spam filtering on by default (level 4, which is a safe level with few false positives) for all users who are not currently using it, changed the mail box format to speed up message folder searching, and added more capability into our mail processing environment to support virus and Spam filtering. During the academic year we will be working on an initiative to raise all student and faculty disk quotas to a minimum of 100 megabytes. A fourth initiative is working to improve classroom technology. We have updated the projectors in lecture halls two and six, updated the laptop carts, brought two new classrooms online in Chemistry with integrated technology, and added technology to three additional classrooms in Social Sciences. Our goal is to continue to make certain we can provide faculty with a quality classroom environment. Beyond these projects, our major work this academic year will be planning a replacement for the myUMBC portal. This portal was launched in 1999 and among the first in higher education; however it is clear we need to move on. Today, portals are expected to provide much more customized content, have a finer granularity of roles, and provide better integration with apAnplications like PeopleSoft. Our intent is to work this fall and select a new portal technology to build upon. During the winter and spring we will integrate our existing content into this portal and launch the portal before next fall. OIT is working closely with the campus eMedia group on this project and will keep the campus informed as we go forward.
FYIHow to Use Classroom Technology in Public Policy Audio Visual Services has prepared PowerPoint presentations on how to use data projectors in classrooms and Lecture Hall 9 of the new Public Policy Bldg. For more information, contact Steve Anderson at 5-3680 or sanderso@umbc.ed, or visit the AV services site at http://www.umbc.edu/avservices. New Media Studio Offers Web Maintenance Service Agreements If you don't have the time or inclination to maintain your department's or organization's UMBC Web site and don't want to keep hiring and retraining students by yourself, OIT's New Media Studio now offers Web maintanance service agreements. For $15-20 an hour (depending on complexity of your site), you'll get an OIT-trained student who is supervised by a full-time New Media staff member. If the student leaves or graduates, your maintanance agreement is still supported by the New Media Studio. If you decide to take over maintenance, just give us two week's notice. The service agreement is limited to basic maintenance such as creating simple pages within an existing site (not wholesale redesigns), and updating a site's Web links, photos or other static content. Creation of interactive forms or online databases may need to be handled by FT staff, depending on their availability and/or or the student's technical ability. If you are interested in a Web maintenance service agreement for your UMBC department or organizational site, contact Vergil Bushnell at vergil@umbc.edu or 410.455.3679. So Long and Hello to OIT Staff During the summer, OIT had two members leave that have done a great job through the years. Jamaal King, one of the early Meyerhoff students and an application developer, left OIT in late June to join the FBI, we wish Jamaal the best of luck as he persues his goal of becoming an FBI agent. Tim Craig, is relocating to Phoenix. Tim joined OIT as a student employee seven years ago and has been a mainstay in the Unix systems group ever since. Joining UMBC are two new staff, David Sylva, as a PeopleSoft developer in our applications group and Dale Ghent in our Unix Systems group. We are thrilled to have both at UMBC. -Jack Suess KUDOS TO . . .Dave Freeman and Jason Griego for their support and quick-wits during the Student Government Association's spring election conducted on Blackboard. While the SGA's election drew more than 1,800 voters--their highest turnout ever--the demand was challenging for our Blackboard 5 server that was nearing the end of its useful life. We won't go into details, but they got the election results out of Bb5. Whew! (JF).
Bob Armstrong, who has been appointed as an Instructional Designer in OIT's New Media Learning & Development unit after serving New Media for two years as the primary staff member for Blackboard support. Prior to joining New Media, Bob worked in AV services. This past spring he was elected to UMBC's Professional Staff Senate and serves as its Vice President for Technology. Mark Cather, who was recently appointed Assistant Director of Networks & Security in the Infrastructure & Support Services unit after serving as coordinator of network services. Cather is also an amatuer radio operator.
Bill Shewbridge, who served on the advisory board of the New Media Center's Horizon Report, which looks at emerging technologies over the next three to five years. Shewbridge has also been appointed Assistant Director of New Media Learning & Development after serving as manager of the New Media Studio. CONTACTSThe OIT Newsletter (www.umbc.edu/oit/newsletter) is provided as a service to UMBC students, faculty and staff, and to help keep OIT staff updated on the work and interests of their colleagues. For more information or to suggest story ideas, contact John Fritz at 410.455.6596 or fritz@umbc.edu.
Office of Information Technology (www.umbc.edu/oit)
|
|
