News

To complement the inauguration of the campus wireless LAN, two notebook loan pools have been set up since last March and maintained by the Facilities Management Office (FMO) and the Library (LIB) respectively to lend compatible notebook computers to our students. With such a notebook in hand, students would be connected to the campus network and hence the Internet in most of the public areas on campus. The popularity of the notebooks reigned all, and below is a brief account of how the loan pools have been doing.FMO

To prepare for the new academic year, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) has added resources to some of the critical central servers as enhancement to some of the existing services or as additions of new services.A lot of resources have been added, particularly to the existing Sun Starfire machines. These include additions of system boards, memory and storage space. Some of the upgrades include the following:

The Computing Services Centre (CSC) receives lots of job requests from departments/offices every day. These requests are handled on a first-come-first-served basis. In order to allow colleagues to check the status of their work requests, a Web-based enquiry system has been developed. This easy-to-use enquiry system provides detailed information on all requests on-line. With this system, you can selectively look at the requests by various means, such as request number, department, and requested date range.

The University Computer Shop has just signed with the IBM to become its dealer. The Shop currently holds dealerships with the IBM, DELL, and SUN and offers very attractive prices on wide ranges of their products including desktops and notebooks. However, if you are looking for specially tailored machines or cost-effective desktops, you definitely should consider our CTC Computers, a home-made computer which is guaranteed to be value for money.

With the widespread use of the Internet and the growing number of Internet users, it has become more important than ever to improve the security measures in the use of the Internet so as to protect the users and service providers. In view of this, the Information Services Advisory Committee of the CityU has resolved that users of the CityLink Plus need to display their phone numbers when using the dial-up facility. In fact the majority of users have already had their phone numbers shown when they were using the CityLink Plus facility.

With reference to our article on “Broadband: An Express Highway to the Net” published in the last issue of Network Computing as well as the CSC Forum on “Introduction to Broadband Internet”, it has become clear that broadband is gradually replacing the traditional 56Kbps modem line in terms of Internet access from home. With so many Internet Service Providers (ISP) jumping on the bandwagon to provide broadband Internet services, let us examine some of the benefits it may bring to our staff when we subscribe these services:

Eudora 3 has been used inside the CityU for more than two years now. It may be a good time now to upgrade it to a newer version, Eudora 4. The Computing Services Centre (CSC) has been testing this new version and finds many new features and advantages over the old one.Eudora 4 brings you a new user interface as well as some powerful and user-friendly functions that enable you to manage your e-mail more comfortably. Among the new features provided, some major ones are:

To allow application software vendors and enterprise customers in Hong Kong to benchmark their wares, and to enable CityU colleagues to carry out highly CPU intensive work or research projects, the University and Sun Microsystems have established a HK$20 million worth Enterprise Competency Centre (ECC).The ECC is housed inside the Computing Services Centre (CSC) and equipped with an E10000, a supercomputer class of machine with 24 top-of-the-line 400 MHz UltraSparc CPUs with a total processing power of 19.2 Gflops. It also comes with 6GB memory and 460 GB disk space. Half of the machine is reserved for CityUs’ general academic and research purposes, and the other half for software vendors to demonstrate proof-of-concept and to run application performance benchmarks.

Introduction Following the public release of Windows 2000, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) had set up a Windows 2000 Task Force to study the possibility of deploying the Windows 2000 Professionals (W2K Prof) or the Windows ME (Win ME, to be released soon according to Microsoft (MS)) as the next desktop environment, and Windows 2000 Server as the departmental server environment. The integration between the desktop and server side will also be examined. As to the Windows 2000 Server, the task force will study the new Active Directory design as compared with our existing NT Domain architecture, and perform testing on Windows 2000 Server. However, in this article we shall only concentrate on the description of our plan for implementing W2K Prof/Win ME as our next desktop environment.

Due to the world trend of streamlining the operating systems to Unix-based and to avoid duplication of our limited resources, all academic OpenVMS Alpha or VAX servers will gradually be phased out. These include the Alpha machines Texas and Spain, and the VAX machine Cairo, all of which are part of the Alpha Cluster nodes.> The first phase will involve discontinuing the VAX machine Cairo, and will be completed before the next academic year starts. The second phase will be over by the end of next academic year and the Alpha machines Texas and Spain will be de-commissioned and no more support will be provided. However, the central machines for the staff e-mail servers, which are also OpenVMS-based, will not be affected. >