Network & Systems

We recently surpassed 4000 Norse Apps users. All students have now migrated, 50% of Faculty, and 43% of Staff users have migrated. We’ve also invited Luther Alumni who have been using luther.edu email forwarding accounts to convert those accounts into full Norse Mail accounts.

All Faculty and Staff must convert their email account to Norse Mail by 12/31/2008.

If you’re interested in seeing how much Internet traffic Luther generates, or how much of it is currently flowing through each of our 3 Internet connections, you can view that information on this graph of the traffic. Luther Internet Traffic

Facilities is planning a power outage in Valders on Friday, August 22nd from 8:00 a.m. – noon. With no power the network in Valders will be down at the same time.

Facilities is planning a power outage in Olin Hall on Monday, August 25th from 12:30 p.m.. – 5:00 p.m.. With no power the network in Olin will be down at the same time.

Luther’s internet connection now consists of connections to 3 different ISP’s. In networking lingo, this arrangement is referred to as being multihomed. Our internet connection is now 25Mbps to the Iowa Communications Network (ICN), 15Mbps to Northeast Iowa Telephone (NEIT), and 45Mbps to Mediacom.

What does having a multihomed internet connection mean for you?

1.) 15Mbps + 25Mbps + 45Mbps = 85Mbps total connection speed. That’s more than double the 40Mbps of internet bandwidth that we had last school year.

2.) The biggest benefit of being multihomed is Fault Tolerance.

A short outage in our internet connectivity was inadvertently caused this morning as we were working to increase our internet bandwidth. This problem has been corrected and no further outages are expected.

Students.luther.edu will be unavailable for several days due to a hardware upgrade that must be completed before the start of the 2008-2009 academic year. File services will be stopped on August 12th at 1:00 pm to allow for a full backup that must be completed before the hardware upgrade can begin.

I have found and fixed the configuration errors that have been eluding me on the Sampson-Hoffland wireless network. It is now broadcasting the LCWireless SSID and a fully functioning part of the campus wireless network.

Facilities Management is planning a power outage at 7:30AM on 8/11/08 for the following buildings: Regents Center, Sampson Hoffland, Center for the Arts, Ylvisaker, Miller/Dieseth and Farwell. Since our network equipment will not have power, the network in these buildings will also be down at that time.

In addition, though the power will be up, the network in Campus House, Koren, Jensen, and Baker Village will also be down, becase it is serviced by buildings that will be without power.

For the past several years we’ve been using a device called the Alot NetEnforcer, and for several years before that we used a device called a Packeteer Packetshaper. The purpose of these devices is to analyze network traffic that goes through our internet connection, identify the traffic type, and then apply rules that I’ve written to manage the traffic. For example, I’ve got a rule that limits the total amount of bandwidth that can be used by P2P applications. The idea behind this rule is to ensure that P2P applications aren’t allowed to use up all of our available internet bandwidth.