News

A lot has been said about the benefits of implementing wireless LAN in the entire campus of CityU. As a matter of fact, the successful outcome of the pilot project was reported in the previous issue of Network Computing. The response was very positive and those staff and students engaged in the project recommended that the provision be extended to a larger number of classrooms. In view of this, the Computing Services Centre had requested funding to expand the project and to provide additional wireless connections in the classrooms, the academic departments and the common areas like the Library, the Mall and the student canteen. In addition, it was proposed that the number of video projectors be increased, and made available through a loan system for use in the classrooms. As an ample supply of notebooks is needed for the success of wireless LAN, the introduction of a notebook loan scheme was also proposed.

>Huge volume of outgoing Internet traffic, amounting to over 5 Gigabytes per hour, was recorded between 28 September and 5 October 1999, resulting in slow Internet responsiveness during the period and the University was subject to a charge for jeopardising the shared HARNET Internet link.>Four SUN workstations were identified having contributed to such traffic. These workstations are believed to have been compromised by an unknown hacker and used for launching attacks against some Internet sites. Presumably these were some sort of denial-of-service attacks in which the remote systems (victims) were bombarded with heavy incoming traffic in order to cripple or bring down their services. Even though the four SUN workstations were also victims (for being hijacked) themselves in this case, they are nevertheless legally liable for any damage (such as losses in bandwidth, cpu, data, service, business, etc.) caused to the remote systems.

CityU’s own Internet link was upgraded to 10 Mbps shared bandwidth on 7 October, 1999, and it is now connected to UUNET Hong Kong (UUNET is the largest ISP in the world). The upgrade not only provides faster Internet access to staff and students, but also enables the link to be used as a backup for the local HARNET as well as HARNET’s Internet links.Prior to the upgrade, the link was connected to the NetPlus service of the Cable and Wireless HKT with guaranteed bandwidth of 512 Kbps. The upgrade was intended to increase the Internet bandwidth to 1 Mbps so that the total Internet bandwidth of the university would become comparable with those of the other local universities. A 10 Mbps shared bandwidth would effectively produce at least 1 Mbps equivalent of guaranteed bandwidth under normal situations, but its cost was much less than that of 1 Mbps guaranteed bandwidth. (One major drawback of guaranteed bandwidth is that once the bandwidth is fully utilised, network performance will drop to the floor.)

A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a flexible data communication system implemented as an extension to, or as an alternative for, a wired LAN within a building. Using radio frequency technology, WLAN receives and transmits data over the air, minimising the need for wired connections. As WLAN has gained great popularity in a number of industries in the last several years, it seems that the technology can also be used in education.

 

To meet the increasing demand of PC laboratories for conducting computer classes and hands-on tutorials, we have swapped Rooms J and K and equipped Room J with more PCs. After this swap, Room K is housed with 30 SUN UltraSparc 5 workstations while Room J has 50 PCs with large 17" XGA monitors. In addition, Room J is redecorated with newly designed furniture, arranging in U-shape layout similar to that of Room E which includes computer desks, printer tables and an instructor desk.

In this summer, the Computing Services Centre has been working on upgrading the PolyLink e-mail to a new Web-based e-mail system. The e-mail system is built upon the Sun Internet Mail Server (SIMS) system and the Mailspinner Web-based e-mail user interface running on the powerful Sun UltraSparc Enterprise servers. Besides having a better user interface and system performance, this new system also supports all open standard features, including the binary attachment feature, which is missing in our current PolyLink e-mail system.

In order to be y2k compliant, the DECNET and all the services depending on it, especially the Pathworks Mail, under Windows 95/DOS were phased out on 31 August 1999.These services were:“Email - PATHWORKS MAIL” “Personal Directory M: - Connect” “Personal Directory M: - Connect (Any Account)” “Change Account Password (Email, Open VMS)” “PC240 - Terminal Emulation Program” “Check Disk Quota (Email, Open VMS)” “Email - PATHWORKS MAIL” “Personal Directory M: - Connect” “Personal Directory M: - Connect (Any Account)” “Change Account Password (Email, Open VMS)” “PC240 - Terminal Emulation Program” “Check Disk Quota (Email, Open VMS)”

The CityU Intranet was successfully implemented in early August. Since then, University Messages followed suit and became Web-based. Therefore it is possible to add many interesting elements like pictures, images, sounds etc. to the messages. Incorporating hyperlinks also makes it easy to direct Web surfers to related or more detailed information. Most important of all, you can now read these messages wherever and whenever you have an Internet connection.If you are using your office networked PC, simply double click the

WeWe have been providing in-house dial-up facility for members of the University for several years. Though we always employ the most advanced technologies at the time of installation, as time goes by, the advancement of new telecommunication technologies is so rapid that it becomes impractical to keep on upgrading our existing modem pools to catch up with the contemporary standards. This results in a degradation of performance. On the other hand, the emphasis on using IT for teaching has stimulated a large crowd of users who need fast Internet access frequently and the demand for dial-up facility to support Web-based instructions keeps increasing. As such, there is an urgent need to replace our present dial-up equipment. However, sooner or later we will encounter another cycle of obsolescence. Therefore, the only way out is outsourcing.