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.
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.
More schools are subjecting clients to an array of security checks before they’re allowed to log on to campus networks. American University is deploying, and Villanova is piloting, the Cisco Clean Access software (formerly Perfigo’s Clean Machine). Clean Access intercepts a client logon; checks to see that the PC is running things such as up-to-date software patches, anti-virus definitions and security settings; and only then allows access to the network. If the software detects a problem, it redirects the user to a Web site for instructions, patches and updates.
“The costs of doing without this [capability] have just gotten to be too much,” American University’s Whitman says. “When the Sasser worm struck [two years ago] it put us out of business pretty badly.”
To achieve similar goals, Framingham State is deploying Bradford Campus Manager, which is software for registering client devices and checking that they have up-to-date software, including anti-virus. The software collects the device’s media access control address, which is then associated with a range of other user information: IP address, user name, dorm address, phone number. “If a student sets up an FTP server, we can now track that to what port they’re plugged into, what room they’re in,” Zinkus says.
Some institutions are spending time finding and expunging the use of student Social Security numbers as identifiers. This data is critical for identity thieves. The Ohio State University in Columbus has records stretching back to the mid-1980s, covering hundreds of thousands of former students and staff. The university is sifting through electronic records, revising applications, and educating faculty and students about avoiding the use of this data, says Charles Morrow-Jones, director of security.
He’s also evaluating anti-spyware applications from start-ups as well as established anti-virus vendors such as Symantec. The university also is evaluating Microsoft’s Windows AntiSpyware beta code, which Microsoft recently acquired by buying a start-up called Giant. “We see spyware as more of a malware transmission vector than viruses are right now,” Morrow-Jones says. “Is there a difference between adware and spyware? At the moment, I’m of the school of thought that says, ‘Hey, it’s all junk.'”
New services
Computers and networks are increasingly central to the interaction between teacher and student, and between students. For more schools, priorities are in the area of sophisticated new applications that combine online resources with collaboration tools.
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland this summer is going live with its MediaVision Courseware project, which has been a pilot project for the last three semesters for students majoring in chemistry. MediaVision combines Virage’s video indexing and cataloging software with Anystream’s encoding and video content management software. Case programmers added support for threaded conversations, instant messaging and other features, says Lev Gonick, the university’s CIO.
A video camera in the classroom records a lecture, which MediaVision then digitizes, indexes and stores. Students access the MediaVision Web page and can search the video archive for specific topics such as hydrogen reactions. The student selects a clip from the list created by MediaVision, then clicks to replay it. Students in the introductory chemistry course scored a half-grade higher than students in the past, Gonick says.
The school’s department of dance and theater has been using video, audio and a lot of bandwidth to coordinate cross-country dance performances, with live music, for instruction and evaluation. Students, choreographers, dancers and musicians can be in different locations yet participate together in real time.
“We’ve begun to shift the resource allocations [for networking and IT] from the basic utility function to value-added services, things that contribute to better learning, better research, better community,” Gonick says.
In other words, it’s a good bet that college and university network professionals probably can’t look forward to extended summer vacations in the future, either.
