Network & Systems

Akamai has replaced the 3 servers they’ve had hosted on our network since June 2001 with a single more powerful server. After a brief lapse failures of the old servers, and the new one coming online, Akamai content is once again being served locally on our network.

For those that don’t know what Akamai does, let me explain in a bit more detail. Akamai’s customers pay them to host content from their websites on servers close to the users of the website.

West Union Trenching completed the installation of 5 separate inter-duct runs today, which is the first phase of 4 different projects. The inter-duct will allow for Telephone and Fiber upgrade for Gjerset House Spanish House and the Campus Guest House on High Street. Inter-duct was also installed between Olin and the Library by Nustead parking lot which will allow for the relocation of the emergency Blue Phone. Finally they installed 2 lengths of inter-duct at Baker Village which will facilitate the installation of wireless coverage.

An engineer will be on campus at Thursday, May 28th at 9:00 AM to add additional disk capacity to our SAN. A firmware upgrade will take place Friday, May 22nd at 5:00 PM in preparation for this additional capacity. No downtime will required for these upgrades. This will result in approximately 9TB of additional space for our servers.

This morning I completed configuration of the network switchs in Ockham House to require that all computers connecting to the Ockham House wired network are registered before they are allowed to access the network.

Also as part of this change computers in Ockham House will now receive IP addresses in a different range.

Student computer registrations will be deleted on 5/26/2009. Students will need to re-register their computers for network access when they return to campus after 5/26. This includes both students that will be taking classes or working here this summer and students returning in the fall.

We had a fiber cut today in the renovation work that is going on in Valders. The cut fiber is one of several routes our network traffic takes going to and from the internet. Our internet connection is designed with redundancy in mind. Though this redundancy worked almost completely, a routing issue occurring that caused access to vpn.luther.edu to be inaccessible from off campus. This issue has now been fixed and access to the VPN has been restored. VPN service was unavailable from the time of the fiber cut (about 10:30AM) until about 7:30PM.

Facilities Services plans to shut off electricity in the following areas on Memorial Day to perform maintenance: Miller, Dieseth, Ylvisaker, Union, Regents Center, Valders, Sampson Hoffland, Olin, Farwell and the CFA. There will be no network service in these buildings while the power is turned off.

In addition, network service in several buildings is dependent on buildings where electricity will be shut off. There will be no network connectivity in the following locations (even though they will have elctricty): Baker Village, Koren, Jenson, Campus House, Library Wireless Network.

Ryan and I have moved the network speed test from the helpdesk webserver to the lis webserver. You can now access it at http://lis.luther.edu/speedtest/ .

Our internet connection is now back up and appears to be stable after a router firmware upgrade.

Our ImageStream routers are built on the open source BGP routing software called Quagga. Apparently we experienced the same problem this morning as many other Quagga users.

BGP internet routing is based on every network being assigned a unique number called an AS number. (Luther College is AS Number 46115) Apparently somewhere on the internet someone was recently assigned an AS Number bigger than 100,000.

Internet service has been completely down on campus since about 7AM this morning. We are currently working to resolve the problem.