Technology News

Network Outage Sunday November 8th 7 AM to Noon

Network Services will be doing maintenance to the main network storage on Sunday November 8th. Most network services will be offline from 7 AM until noon on Sunday. Internet access will still be available. This is the second and final outage related to this project and there are not further planned outages of this magnitude. Thanks for your patience and understanding while this work is completed. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact TSS at 867-6627.

This is a question that just came in from a student who was interested in knowing if video chat would work on campus using some of the popular tools such as Google video chat.  The short answer is well, sorta, but it might be sporadic.

For those who care about the details, the college currently has a 45Mb/sec connection to the Internet. This connection is shared by all campus users. The basic principal we follow in managing the connection is to share equally and create the best experience possible for the majority of uses.

Even though we have a relatively small connection, it is possible to share it amongst a large number of users because most uses consist of short bursts of activity such as browsing the web. There are uses such as streaming video and file sharing, that tend to be continuous rather than short bursts of activity. If even 30 people, were doing these kinds of continuous activities, it would severely degrade the experience of the large numbers of people doing the lighter activities such as web browsing. This is the instance where we do not just share equally. Preference is given to the traffic that is bursty such as web browsing. There is also a higher priority given to traffic originating from academic spaces and faculty and staff offices. This is done to ensure that class lab activities, etc go as smoothly as possible.

For an institution our size, we have a limited connection. During the coming year we will be upgrading the connection adding another 50% or more bandwidth. It is our goal to be able to at least double the connection by the end of the 10/11 academic year.

Thanks for the initial question (it’s a good one!) and we’ll keep you posted..

We now have a draft budget for this next year ready for the Board of Trustee approval. This has been a stressful process for everyone and I want to thank all IT staff across the campus for your input and your willingness to discuss ideas for how to best continue to serve the campus with fewer resources. The process was a little rough at times but as always seems to happen around here, it came together at the deadline.

Now lets talk about what the new budget means to technology, assuming the Board approves the draft. A couple of years ago we founded the Advancement of Technology funds. This was an annual allocation of about $78,000 that was to be used to support development and deployment of new technologies on campus. The Information Technology Collaborative Hive was responsible for recommending what projects should be funded from this source with the approval by the Vice Presidents. Unfortunately, these funds are proposed to be a part of our budget reductions and will not be available for the foreseeable future. Also, impacting the community is a reduction in the funding used each year to replace equipment as it ages and/or breaks. This will cause us to revert back to the practice of asking for and using one-time funding when a system fails. There are also other reductions and changes within C&C that will impact our ability to provide support to the faculty, students and staff across the campus.

I know the reductions proposed will impact the performance and maintenance of our current systems and our efforts to advance the use of new technologies in teaching and learning. This proposal has come about from numerous discussions and input from across campus such that I am confident that these reductions to our budget represent the best option for supporting the campus mission. My experience has been that as budget discussions give way to implementation planning, often opportunities arise that would not have been feasible in the past as the organization adjusts to the new funding levels. I would encourage everyone to think openly as we begin the process to implement the budget and to encourage everyone to participate as much as possible in meetings, workgroups and/or taskforces working on developing strategies for the coming year.