News

The Computing Services Centre (CSC) offers a variety of IT services to the students and helps manage a lot other services jointly supported by the cooperative efforts of administrative and/or academic departments. Some of these services include the e-Learning service, the e-Portal service, the Email service, the student network software service, the notebook loan service, the terminal room and printing services, the VPN connection service, etc. It will need a whole page just to list them all.

Due to continuous increase in student numbers and demand for Teaching Studios with larger capacity, the CSC has doubled the number of PC workstations in Room L making it possible to support 60 students doing computer practical exercises simultaneously. After this renovation, the room has the following settings:

X-Win32 (X-Server for PC) is a Microsoft Windows program that will turn a PC into an X Window System server. It will allow X client programs located on other computers (usually UNIX) to display the output at your PC using the MIT X11 protocol. The software offers a broad range of features and capabilities, including the innovative feature of allowing users to run multiple UNIX and Linux desktops from different UNIX and Linux servers.

As publicized in the article "Delayed Deployment of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (WinXP SP2)" (Network Computing, Issue 41 - September 2004), WinXP SP2 is more than just a series of bug fixes but significant changes to the security protection mechanism. These changes can affect both existing applications and applications under development as they may cause incompatibility and render these applications unusable.

In the light of the surging hacking attacks, security protection has become the top priority in all data centres worldwide. With our repeated plea for help and cooperation, some of our users apparently still cannot understand the importance of a good password practice. It is believed that the awareness of the importance of password control needs to be further promoted here.

Starting from October 1st the bandwidths of the HARNET's International Internet link and the University's own Internet link have been upgraded from 155 Mbps to 240 Mbps, and from 12 Mbps to15 Mbps respectively. Apart from the bandwidth upgrades, the local HARNET2 connections, which used to be ATM links, have been replaced with Fast Ethernet links. The upgrades will be able to cater the bandwidth requirements of our users in the next 12 months as well as to ensure a smooth network performance by avoiding congestions during peak hours.

Security incidents such as virus infection or hacking of machines in the Student Residence (SR) have been a recurrent and serious problem faced by the Computing Services Centre (CSC) since the inception of the SR. Causes leading to the current situation are many, some of them are:

Back in Feb 2001, the University studied and adopted the Network Storage System (NSS) as the standard platform for providing central storage. The advantages of using the NSS include the provision for high availability and disaster recovery capability, the simplification of the backup process by sharing multiple tape drives among various servers, the provision of data sharing among multiple servers, and the flexibility of storage management and expandability. Since then, the Storage Area Network (SAN) was purchased from the EMC Inc.

In order to cope with the surging increase of student intake in September 2004, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) has adjusted the provision of student services and below is a brief outline of it. The CSC teaching studios and terminal rooms are all made available to the University for central timetabling purpose before the start of semester so that the University can take the reins of scheduling classes under an extremely tight classroom situation. As the last class ends one hour later at 10:20 p.m., the Service Counter, the Help Desk as well as the Maintenance Workshop of the CSC have all extended their service hours in order to provide timely services when required. Besides, more student helpers have been added to the Service Counter to cater for the increasing enquiries from students on campus and at home.

The Joint Universities Computer Centre (JUCC) is a cooperative effort on the development of information technology and services among the Computer Centres of the eight government-funded tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. As an active member, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) has participated in many joint functions. Video collaboration is one of the major roles in which we work together for video broadcast and video conferencing services over our highly integrated data and video network.