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April 2000 - Spring 2000 System Update Information
- Network Upgrades - We have been busy upgrading
network hardware. We have been replacing 10Mbit switches with
10/100Mbit switches, so the baseline network port for the
department now supports full-duplex 100Mbit switched ethernet
connections. These switches are connected via 100Mbit
Ethernet and 155Mbit ATM connections to the CS backbone.
We are on schedule to upgrade these uplinks to 1000BaseT
Gigabit Ethernet connections during the Summer of 2000.
- Wireless Network Upgrade - We have upgraded our
wireless network offering with the addition of 11Mbit 802.11
Wavelan access points. This higher speed standard significantly
improves throughput and there are drivers available for notebooks
running Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
- Sun Upgrades - We are in the process of upgrading
approximately 15 Sun workstations in various locations within
Lindley. At the completion of these upgrades, all of the Suns
in the graduate student offices should be Ultras.
- Backup Server Upgrade - If you have ever accidentally
removed a file, you know the value of reliable system backups.
We are increasing our backup capacity to meet the needs of
ever expanding disk usage with the addition of a Breece Hill
Q4.50 tape library. This unit holds 50 DLT tapes and has
2 DLT7000 tape drives for a total capacity of 3.5 terabytes.
- Software - Numerous software systems have been installed
and upgraded recently.
This includes
wvWare
and
antiword
for converting Word documents to html or text,
Octave
for numerical computation,
Dia
for drawing diagrams,
as well as funstuff like
Xearth
and
XEphem.
Please see the
Software Database
for more information about the available software.
- Upcoming projects - We have quite a lot of work scheduled for
the Summer of 2000. This includes the following projects:
- Networking - We are planning to add Gigabit Ethernet switches
and will be making significant changes to the network architecture
to increase performance and increase the number of available
IP numbers.
- Administrative Computing - The primary NT server for the
administrative group will be upgraded and additional disk capacity
will be added.
- Teaching Support - The server for the teaching support clusters,
hannibal, will be upgraded.
- Burrow Upgrade - The Suns in the Burrow will be getting
a boost in memory. Each machine will be getting 256MB of additional
memory.
- LH115 - The PCs in the LH115 teaching cluster will be
getting a major overhaul, with faster processors and more memory.
- CGI server - The server supporting general access to
CGI programming will be upgraded.
As always, we expect to have a busy Summer so that the systems are
running smoothly for the start of the Fall semester.
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