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We have 14 classrooms in our business school equipped with live data jacks. Because the students usually have laptops in class, the faculty has a hard time capturing their attention. Even though the laptop is an incredible tool for learning, it's also a distraction. Faculty wanted a way to control or shut down what students do on their laptops.
To achieve this, we use Nortel's Enterprise Policy Manager (EPM) with a custom piece of code I wrote to manage the networks in the classrooms from the instructor station.
If I'm teaching a class, for instance, I can use the instructor's workstation in the room to choose what traffic I want to block and those packets are filtered from the edge switches within 5 seconds. The beauty is that each instructor can use the workstations differently. Instructors giving exams online over the student laptops during class can make sure their students have access only to the Web server that holds the university's testing tool. Using the workstation, which is policy-driven, they can guarantee that students can't go to the Web or chat or do e-mail during the exam. The only packets allowed are those to and from the testing server.
Another benefit is that by using a product like this . . . we can prevent viruses and hacking out on the edge. Traditional firewall architecture forces you to send everything through a central point. For us, when we have an outbreak, we want to stop it at the user port so that we don't bring down the core of the network. We can see what filters are getting hit and even if a particular user is getting hit. Traditionally, it would have taken us days to push virus updates and policies out to the edge, but EPM lets us do it in 15 to 20 minutes. Everything is managed from a single server, and there are a great number of switches it can handle remotely. The IT staff is able to write policies, as well as offer teacher-level, in-room access.
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Copyright 2008 Network World Inc.
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