Network & Systems

Tomorrow morning (11-26-08) at 7AM I am planning to work with technicians from Bradford Software to upgrade Campus Manager to the newest version. The actual amount of downtime should be minimal, but users may notice periodic trouble when making a new connection to the wireless network, or when trying to register a previously unregistered computer. I expect this work will be done before noon.

Update The upgrade is complete.

At about 9:30PM tonight (11-24-08) our Internet connection through Mediacom went down. I’ve talked to Mediacom and they confirm that the problem is on their end. They are having some problems with one of their routers. Until our connection to Mediacom comes back up, we will have half of our usual internet bandwidth so users may notice some slowness when using the internet. I will update this blog post as I have more information.

Update As of approximately 1AM 11-25-08 the connection is back up and we again have full internet capacity.

We’re experiencing trouble with the DSL network servicing College Apartments and Prarie Houses. I am working with tech support trying to resolve the problem. I will update this blog post when I have more information.

Update As of 5:30PM 11-24-08 I believe this problem is now resolved.

I have completed configuration of the network switch in the Facilities Management building to require that all computers connecting to it are registered before they are allowed to access the network.

To increase network security, our plan is to eventually have our entire network configured this way. The wireless network, all of ResNet, and most other Academic/Admin buildings are also already configured to require registration.

Also as part of this change computers in the Facilities building will now receive IP addresses in a different range.

At about 4PM this afternoon one of the fiber optic cables that serves Mediacom’s network in our area was cut. Mediacom is one of 3 ISP’s that provide internet service to Luther College. Since only one of our 3 internet connections is down, our connectivity to the internet has not gone down.

Unfortunately our connection to Mediacom is the biggest of our 3 internet connections. That connection being down means that our internet bandwidth is reduced to about half of its usual capacity.

The Alumni office is sending the final notice to Alumni with a full email account and Alumni that use email forwarding encouraging them to create a NorseMail account to continue using their @luther.edu email address beyond November 15th. Accounts for Alumni that do not move their email forwarding and email to NorseApps will be disabled this weekend.

Last week, LIS announced our plan to “invite” all remaining employees to move to Norse Mail today. That invitation has now been extended. Those who have not yet moved to Norse Mail are encouraged to login to your Webmail account where you are now able to start the migration process.

For those remaining, the time has come to move as we have a target date of December 31, 2008 to deactivate local Luther email services for all Luther community members

Google announced yesterday the addition of voice and video chat within Google Chat. They have made this feature available within our own Norse Mail and Norse Chat as well. More information is available here .

The wireless network in Main and Sampson was down for a few minutes this morning. The controller for this part of the network crashed unexpectedly this morning. It has now been rebooted and is working just fine. I will be looking into what can be done to keep this working in a more stable fashion in the future.

At 5PM today, books.luther.edu and encore.luther.edu will be down while maintenance is performed on the books server. Work is planned to be completed before 7PM.