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101 BEST PRACTICES >> Connectivity

11/23/2006

52 :: UBIQUITOUS WIRELESS COVERAGE

Early versions of cellular data service were so slow as to be practically useless, but this is changing. Current offerings provide end-user bandwidth of 300 Kbps to 1.2 Mbps downstream (much superior to a modem and nearly as good as DSL). The key advantages of this technology, from a campus perspective, are that it is already quite pervasive (similar to cell phone coverage), no campus support is required, and there is little or no start-up cost. The primary downside is the fact that you are limited to whatever coverage your carrier’s network provides.

Dewitt Latimer, deputy CIO and chief technology officer at the University of Notre Dame (IN), overcame this last problem by inviting cellular providers to participate in a carrierneutral distributed signal system. Cell providers had been itching to get into the university’s athletic venues, but Notre Dame has a strict policy against cell towers on campus property. The new system places 16 mini cell sites across campus (including classroom buildings and dorms) with “stealthy” antennas (camouflaged to look like lamp posts or other common tall objects). A third-party vendor, NextG Networks, maintains the system and negotiates and coordinates with the carriers. Notre Dame supplied some dark fiber to interconnect the mini cell sites and is compensated for space it provides to house the vendors’ equipment. www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=19106 More info here.

53 :: NETWORKING TO SECURE NETWORKS

To keep connectivity alive and well on your campus, share information suggests Brian Nichols, Louisiana State University CISO. As a member of the Educause/Internet2 Computer and Network Security Task Force, Nichols is active in community efforts to improve overall security in higher ed. “Part of becoming a member of this community is giving back as you’re taking from it,” he says. “One way to share information is to join an Information Sharing and Analysis Center [ISAC]. ISACs provide a means to obtain information from reliable sources, report anonymously, and obtain expertise. The REN-ISAC [Researching and Education Networking ISAC] at Indiana University’s Global Research Network Operations Center is an effort to improve network security in higher ed. By ‘linking up’ with an ISAC, you’re no longer in the deep end by yourself.” More info here.

54 :: GOOGLE AS CONNECTIVITY CONDUIT

In February 2006, Google unveiled its beta of a Gmail-hosted e-mail service that allows organizations to keep their own domains. The idea, of course, is to leverage the hosted services to avoid some of the resource allocations and costs of running onsite systems. By August, the company expanded on the idea by offering a broader range of communications applications. Besides Gmail, Google Apps for Your Domain currently includes the Google Talk instant messaging and voice calling service, Google Calendar for collaborative calendaring, and Google Page Creator for web page design, publishing, and hosting. The apps are available free to approved education beta users, through Google Apps for Education.

San Jose City College (CA) is among the institutions already using Google Apps for Education, citing easy implementation and student familiarity with Google software. And in October, Arizona State University made the first large-scale deployment, creating 65,000 new “Gmail for ASU” accounts at the rate of 300 per hour. More info here.

55 :: KEEP CONNECTIVITY SURGING

Carnegie Mellon University (PA) Network Manager for Electrical and Computer Engineering Lou Anschuetz has an easier way to monitor network activity in real time, as well as document trends. Neon Software’s CyberGauge 7.0 allows network administrators to monitor and manage network bandwidth by automatically creating real-time utilization graphs as well as daily, weekly, and monthly quality of service (QoS) and billing reports. “We who do networking want to know what the historical bandwidth usage is on interfaces,” explains Anschuetz. “In the past, a number of scripts were used to poll the network devices and get that data. You had to do a lot of manual, time-consuming configuration. [With this software], configuration amounts to typing in the password to access network devices, and then just picking from a list which interfaces with the device to monitor.”

56 :: CONNECTING DISCIPLINES TO SUPERCOMPUTING POWER

In April, Indiana University announced its acquisition of “Big Red,” a supercomputing system since proven to be the fastest owned and operated by a US university, and the 23rd-fastest supercomputer in the world, as noted in the recently released Top500. Michael McRobbie, interim provost and VP for academic affairs at IU-Bloomington, says the system gives IU scientists and researchers “the best cyber infrastructure at any university in the US, if not worldwide.” The supercomputer, boasting a peak theoretical capability of 20.4 teraFLOPS, is an e1350 BladeCenter Cluster based on IBM’s latest technology, paired with over 1 petabyte of high-speed disk storage and an additional petabyte of tape.

Major funding comes from the Indiana Metabolomics and Cytomics Initiative, or METACyt, which is funded by a $53 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, and from the National Science Foundation. While the investments represent a big first step in IU’s new Life Sciences Strategic Plan, there’s a lot of supercomputing power that will be accessed by researchers in numerous disciplines, leveraging a services model for advanced research computing. A few of the broad discipline areas to be served include astronomy, informatics, computational physics, and the humanities. The system will also connect to global research networks and play a role in TeraGrid, NSF’s flagship effort to create an advanced national cyber infrastructure. More info here.

57 :: DISPARATE APPS CAN BE CONNECTED

At Rice University (TX), researchers are collaborating with IBM on the development of an openstandards- based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) that will ultimately tie diverse types of academic software applications together. Says Kamran Khan, vice provost for IT: “Discrete, open source applications such as courseware management systems, digital libraries, and content commons are becoming central to the life of a university. It is important to tie these standalone applications together into a more coherent whole.” IBM donated BladeCenter hardware technology, software for an SOA platform, and related services, for a total grant valued at $700,000. Rice will provide a working demonstration environment that already includes implementations of Sakai, DSpace, and Rice’s own Connexions software. Connexions founder Richard Baraniuk comments, “Fusing Sakai, Connexions, and DSpace will make it easy for large and small institutions to get involved in this important movement.”

58 :: VULNERABILITY SCANNING

When it comes to network vulnerability scanners, know your tools and clarify your goals—or be sorry later, asserts CT columnist Doug Gale. Just detecting the vulnerabilities on your campus isn’t enough to protect ongoing network connectivity. The results of the vulnerability scan must be centrally organized into some kind of report that prioritizes the problems found and identifies remedial action. One of the advantages of commercial products is that they usually include sophisticated report writers— extremely valuable in environments (like higher ed) that include tens of thousands of nodes.

The good news for colleges and universities using open source scanners is that the National Institute of Standards and Technology maintains the National Vulnerability Database that integrates all publicly available US government vulnerability resources and provides references to industry resources. The NVD is updated on an hourly basis on business days, and is based on and synchronized with the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures naming standard. Another resource: Cassandra (cassandra. cerias.purdue.edu), operated by Purdue University’s (IN) Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. Cassandra uses the NVD database to provide customized e-mail notifications of vulnerabilities. More info here.

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