IT @ IWU

Each year Illinois Wesleyan University’s office of Information Technology prepares a summary report on the state of technology services at the University. The 2008 IT Summary Report looks at “accomplishments, challenges, and opportunities”.

You can download the “2008 Summary Report” from the IT Reports web page.

Illinois Wesleyan University does allow gaming on the campus network. The staff of the office of Information Technology can help resolve problems with network games as our staff time and the University’s Internet bandwidth allow.  If you are having performance problem playing a game on the campus network, please call the IT Help Desk at (309) 556 3900.

Tags: games network

There will be a number of construction projects starting on campus after commencement. Among these projects will be projects to extend the campus voice, video and data networks. The sites that will have this work include:

• The new Welcome Center
• The Presidents House
• Adams Hall will connect directly to the campus, rather than the current wireless bridge
• Harriet House will receive additional fiber optic cabling
• and the new East Street Apartments will be connected to the network

We appreciate your patience as we work to extend and improve the campus voice, video, and data networks.

We’re seeing an increasing number of takedown notices from the RIAA this semester. Generally these notices mention copyrighted songs being shared from student computers using either the gnutella (bearshare, limewire, etc.) or bittorrent protocols. When we receive such a notice, if we can identify the student computer responsible, we will take the computer off the network and refer the student to the Judicial Affairs department. Sharing copyrighted material on the campus network without permission from the copyright owner is a violation of the University’s IT Usage Policy.

So far, we have not received a “pre-litigation notice” from the RIAA requesting the name of a student for legal action. We have seen reports that the cost to settle such a lawsuit with the RIAA is running about $5000.

The University does shape network traffic to and from the campus network. Peer-to-peer traffic (such as the gnutella and bittorrent) is limited and assigned a low priority. However, since there are legal uses of such applications we do not block peer-to-peer traffic.

If you use peer-to-peer applications for file-sharing, please make sure that you have copyright permission for any file you share. For more information about copyright permssions please see the Ames Library’s Copyright Policies and Practices site.

We’ve been tracking the number of copyright infringement notices the university received for the past three academic years. The attached graph shows the number of notices the University has received by month. Note the recent increase for the Spring 2008 semester.

For the past week we have had intermittent trouble with access to the Ames Library catalog. The University hosts the library catalog on servers operated by CARLI, the Consortium for Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois.  We have done extensive troubleshooting to determine the source of the problem, and at this time the problem appears to be on CARLI’s end. We have a work-around for computers in the Ames Library, and are working with CARLI to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

We’ve begun our 2008 Techqual+ Survey of student perceptions of information technology on campus. The survey will be open for the next two weeks, and responding students will be entered in a drawing to win one of twenty $10 gift certificates from the Illinois Wesleyan University Bookstore.

This is our second time using the Techqual+ survey to assess information technology on campus. For more information about the survey, please see the Techqual+ web site.

I’m pleased to report that, from a technology perspective, registration for the Fall 2008 semester went very well. We had registration events on 4/2, 4/4, 4/7, and 4/9. As of 8am this morning there were 1476 students registered for the Fall semester (entering students will register in August.)

This is a significant improvement from the problems we saw for the Spring registration event last November.

We attribute most of the performance improvement to the new Banner server we installed over Spring break. This was a major project for the IT staff; special thanks to Jeanne Johnson, Pat Riehecky, Curtis Kelch, Chris Rutledge, and Pat Zehr, from our IT staff; Elaine Boris, our Sungard HE remote DBA; and to all the staff in the University’s administrative offices for their work testing the new server before we went live over break.

The Board of Trustees approved the preliminary budget for 2008-2009. This budget includes funds for both operating equipment and capital projects. A memo outlining the process for requesting equipment from the University’s operating equipment budgets for 2008-2009 has been sent to academic and administrative department heads. Department heads have been asked to submit operating requests for operating equipment by May 1, 2008.

Faculty and staff who need new or updated equipment for 2008-2009, should discuss the need with their department head. Questions about the University’s equipment request process should be directed as follows:

• Roger Schnaitter, Associate Provost, for academic equipment
• Fred Miller, Associate VP for Information Technology, for computers for administrative offices, networking, and telecommunications
• Bud Jorgenson, Director of Physical Plant, for general office furnishings and other equipment.

You can find guidelines for department computer purchases here:
http://www2.iwu.edu/IT/help/infofacstaff/computer_buying.shtml

Updated 1:35pm 3/28

We experienced some problems with my.iwu and e-mail this morning. Our systems staff did some maintenance on my.iwu during our scheduled Friday morning maintenance window (2am to 7am.) The problem was related to this work.

Campus e-mail uses my.iwu for password checking, so we also saw some problems with people trying to log-in and check their mail using programs like Thunderbird and Eudora.

Our IT systems staff  have fixed the problem, and all systems should be functioning normally. We apologize for any inconvenience, and appreciate your patience.

If you’re still having problems with campus technology, please call the IT Help Desk at (309) 556 3900.

This is a graph of how much Internet traffic the University used yesterday (measured in 5 minute intervals.) The green shows inbound internet traffic, and the blue line is outbound traffic. It’s pretty typical of what we see for daily Internet use.

The University has a 45megabit connection to the Internet shared by all users on the campus network. The red line on the graph indicates approximately when the University is using all of it’s inbound Internet capability. If you wonder why your Internet connection may seem a bit slow, it’s likely that our connection is near its capacity.

We last upgraded the campus internet connection from 18Mb to 45Mb just two years ago. We have requested that the University set aside sufficient budget for us to again increase our Internet bandwidth this summer.

You can test your internet connection speed with this off-campus service.