Summer vacation has a special meaning for network professionals at U.S. colleges and universities.

It means redoubling efforts to get big projects finished before students and faculty return in the fall.

This year, as last year, many of the summer vacation priorities in higher education focus on network and end user security. But addressing campus security is becoming even more complex and urgent because networks and computing have become more central to education - not simply in administration and operations but also in teaching and learning.

Many schools now need three critical components for this more central role: high-bandwidth local networks, including wireless LANs; high-bandwidth connections with other institutions; and legions of more powerful laptops.

IT "has become so integrated with the curriculum that it can never be extricated," says Carl Whitman, executive director of IT at American University in Washington, D.C. "This whole place is relying on [the network] for its core functions."

Improving infrastructure

Continued improvements to the network infrastructure are priorities this summer on many campuses.

Villanova University in Pennsylvania has nearly doubled the overall Internet bandwidth on campus to 145M bit/sec, and now has its first Internet2 connection at 25M bit/sec, with an option to boost that in the future. "We're very network centric, and we felt [both of these] were a prerequisite," says CIO Stephen Fugale. "Internet2 gives us a collaborative capability both nationally and globally."

Villanova has hired an outside contractor to assess the campus network as the school begins to evaluate VoIP, with a recently launched pilot project using VoIP phones from Cisco, Polycom and others. "We know that the underlying [network] infrastructure is not completely ready overall," Fugale says. "That's why we're getting outside expertise to evaluate this and partner with us."

Framingham State College in Massachusetts is using the summer to upgrade the network cabling at a large dormitory and the College Center, one of the main campus buildings. Gigabit Ethernet connections now link the switches, with the ports running at 10/100M bit/sec. At the same time, the college is planning to equip all classrooms with 802.11a wireless-LAN access points, with the radio power levels lowered so that only students in a given room can connect to that access point. The goal is to optimize throughput and reliability for the classroom, says Michael Zinkus, the school's director of network services.

Security

Security priorities reflect ongoing concerns about preventing a recurrence of the worm attacks that crippled campus networks two years ago. The school also is focusing on adding centralized resources and on securing clients.

Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., is adding more data collection and analysis tools for sifting through network traffic and events to detect potential security problems. The school is also fine-tuning its Network User Status Agent (NUSA ), which is a Web-based system for monitoring and controlling network ports. Using NUSA, the central network group can contact local tech-support teams in various departments when host problems are detected.

The school also has started migrating WLAN users from a VPN-based authentication model to one based on the IEEE 802.1X standard, says Patricia Todus, Northwestern's deputy CIO.