News

Linux, featuring flexibility, open system standard, and vast free resources (including itself), has become the hottest operating system today.The Survey and Results To find out how Linux has been used in CityU, we performed an on-line survey in December 2002. We collected around 60 responses from academic, research and administrative staff. Statistics indicated that two thirds of the respondents had Linux experience and most of them used Red Hat Linux on the PC platform. If Linux is to be supported in the future, most respondents recommend Red Hat Linux, and they need central support in various areas, including system maintenance, security, training, troubleshooting and others.

Effective from 1 July 2003, the size of the existing modem pool will be reduced and re-arranged as follows:Student-only Pool, 2-hour limit (440 lines), hunt group number: 24704400.Student and Staff Pool, 2-hour limit (80 lines), hunt group number: 24704402. Student-only Express Pool, 30 minutes limit (100 lines), hunt group number: 24704401.All modem pools are allowed to access the Internet.

If you are an IBM computer user who has not yet heard about the CityU's IBM ThinkPad (TP) Service Centre, you will be glad to know that it is now located at Room G2504 adjacent to the entrance of the Computing Services Centre (CSC) on the 2/F of Academic Building to provide speedy and convenient service to users. Established only three months ago, this on-site Service Centre is a partnership agreement between IBM and CityU with the following benefits to staff and department users:

As In a recent routine health and security check of on-campus computers (as some of you might be aware), we found that a large number, over 3,000 at least, of PCs were turned on after office hours and left running overnight. This gives rise to two issues. First, PCs left running unattended overnight will easily become the targets for illegal activities, such as hacking, virus spreading, spamming etc. and this in turn poses potential threats to the University. Second, these PCs consume considerable amount of electricity at night, which implies a significant amount of money spent. This is a sheer waste of energy and money and must be stopped, especially when the University is in an increasingly tight financial situation.

This summer, a collection of useful software has been added to the CSC student LAN which is accessible in the CSC Student Terminal Area. Some are simply software upgrades while others may be new to staff and students. The followings are brief descriptions of the newly installed software which may become handy to some of you:1. Kingsoft PowerWord

Although Linux has not been taken up as a work desk environment in the desktop world like the Windows operating systems from Microsoft, Linux machines have already been widely deployed for various academic activities over the years. However, with the increasing number of these machines, security management has become a major issue for some departments especially those that do not have technical staff for providing the support. As a matter of fact, several cases have occurred in which a number of these machines have been attacked by Internet hackers.

The Hard Copy Centre was founded in February 1994 to mainly provide colour output services to staff and students of the university. It was then combined with the Design and Production team of MPU to form the Media Production Service (MPS) in September 1998. According to the recent management re-organisation, the MPU (including the MPS) was merged with the University Press and was moved to the Festival Walk Office on 1 March 2003.

From time to time, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) reviews the size of the modem pool as well as the number of lines provided in each group based on the utilisation statistics collected and the budget available. To ensure effective use of the University resources, starting from Semester B 2003, the staff and the student modem pools have been merged together to form a single large modem pool. As the new modem pool can be accessed by using the same prime numbers previously adopted by the respective student and staff modem pool i.e.

As more and more files are being shared across the Internet, it is important that their file sizes can be compressed providing shorter downloading / transferring time. Furthermore, files often get corrupted when they are transferred "loose" over Internet lines and therefore a certain kind of protection is required. This is why "zip archives" are so popular.

Recently, the University's student intranet has been replaced by the CityU e-portal. This marks the beginning of a new era in the use of electronic communications in the University. There is no doubt that the World Wide Web (WWW) has completely transformed the use of computer networks for distribution of information. Everybody, from large multi-national corporations to single individuals, is putting up WEB sites that promote and describe their organization or the services they provide.