Upgrade of Staff LAN

 

In view of the above issues, there will be a major upgrade exercise for all staff LANs under CSC's management in September :

• In order to reduce the boot-up time, staff PCs will no longer be remotely booted from network, they will be booted from their local hard disks instead. However, since all network files and programs will reside on local disk, they are therefore more vulnerable to damages or virus attack, thus users are advised to take all preventive measures against data loss.

  As the upgrade of staff LAN does not include the provision of the local hard disk, if users have not been allocated one yet, please bring this to the attention of your department.

  The network operating system of all client PCs will be upgraded from Pathworks 4 to Pathworks 5.

• All 8-bit network cards will be replaced by 16-bit ones which have better data transfer rate.

• All staff LAN servers will be replaced by Pentium 90 machine running Windows NT. The Pentiums are more cost effective than the existing VAXstation. In future, departments may consider additional Pentiums for fail-over or performance enhancement purposes.

• New printer servers with much smaller footprint supporting a variety of network protocols will replace those existing terminal servers or AT printer servers which support only the Local Area Transport (LAT) protocol. These new printer servers are more flexible in deployment, more cost effective, and can be managed by different hardware platforms running various network operating systems such as: NT, UNIX, and Netware.

• All Staff's 386 or slower machines will be replaced by 486 or Pentium with at least 8 MB memory in order to run under Windows environment.

• DOS, Windows, and some popular software will now be centrally provided and managed by CSC. This will ensure version compatibility among networked machines.

Since the upgrade involves the replacement of over 50 servers as well as software installation on local hard disks of around 2000 workstations, it may take at least six months to complete. A booklet will later be available to describe all the new features and changes of the upgraded staff LANs.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk