Last week’s Internet outages in several residence hallswas caused by a router that started having problems late last year.”The old router was very temperamental,” said GeorgeChrisman, the associate vice president of the InformationTechnology Services team. ITS hopes the new router, installed lastweek, will solve any residual problems caused by the failinghardware.
In an effort to prevent further technical problems, ITS hascompleted several new projects and plans are in the works forseveral more.
The department has future plans for increasing Internetbandwidth, has already added new firewall and SPAM servers andimplemented an online password reset tool.
Students, faculty and staff are in a constant need for a betterconnection to the Internet. Due to the increase in demand,SMU’s bandwidth will increase from a 25 megabyte T-3 line toa 120 megabyte line over the winter break. Chrisman said the$50,000-per-year investment is part of a joint arrangement withlocal area universities, including Texas Christian University, theUniversity of North Texas, the University of Texas at Dallas andthe University of Texas at Arlington. The five universities willshare a one gigabyte line with a main circuit at UTD. It will takethree to four months to install the hardware at UTD, Chrisman said,which is why it will take so long to complete the change.
Although it restricts downloading of illegal music and movies oncampus, the firewall server helps protect the campus from viruses,which can spread easily through the network.
If a student plugs an infected computer into the network, thevirus can travel to hundreds of computers in seconds.”We’re always looking for better protection [fromviruses],” Miller said.
The new firewall server can also read packets of data todetermine whether a computer is infected or if the computer hasvirus software. The ITS department has always recommended virusprotection software in the past, but now it is required. Theuniversity negotiated a purchase agreement with virus-protectionsoftware giant McAfee, which is now available for $10 in thecomputer corner.
The SPAM server, implemented at the end of May, filters throughmore than 200,000 e-mails per day, more than 65 percent of whichare SPAM.
An online password reset tool allows students, faculty and staffto reset their Access and SMU E-mail password. More than 50 percentof calls to the ITS help desk last year were password resetrequests. Implementing the online resent tool will drasticallystreamline the process, Chrisman said.
Based on customer surveys and feedback from faculty and staff,Access has been remodeled by minimizing the number of “dryclicks” (the clicks you had to make before getting to thepage you wanted) and adding a class schedule to the front page.
New e-mail servers with improved hardware recently arrived oncampus and will be installed within the next month.
Checking Spam Mail
Go to http://spam.smu.edu
Login using your SMU ID number and your email password.
Once you have logged into the quarantine server, you will see alist of email identified as SPAM.
Either delete SPAM messages or retrieve valid emails.
A copy of the message will be sent to ITS, but this is noguarantee that future messages from the same sender will not bequarantined.
