Campus Network

November 14, 2006

Present: Jay Smith, Kevin Danielson, Michelle Rakoczy, Bryon Hills, Don Larson, Josh Jones, Tony Houdek, Tracy Uhlir, Jing Wang, Renetta Johnson, Brad Miller, Dale Ricke and Bonnie Jundt

Absent: Barry Pederson, Carl Warrene, Larry Fisk, David Belgarde, Doug Osowski, Roy Beard, Brandon Thorvilson, John Wold, Corey Quirk, Chad Gratton, and Corey Shock

October 10 minutes – approved

Follow-up from October minutes:

·  DNSOne update (Kevin): The DNSOne upgrade was completed without outstanding issues. The new software appears to be significantly faster and more user friendly. ITSS is ready to respond to requests for delegating specific IP address ranges to those interested in managing their own DNS or DHCP services. Progress is being made with getting zone records in the different views for internal hosts with private addresses to resolve DNS records to their internal address. We will continue working toward getting more of the internal networks added.

·  Authentication with multiple LDAPs (Bonnie): The issue regarding the use of multiple LDAPs for network authentication was discussed further in ITSS with the understanding of the desire for some areas of campus to manage their own users. Future direction with campus-wide identity management and the implications of using multiple LDAPs will continue to be discussed to gain a better understanding of the issues. The School of Medicine, Aerospace, and School of Business are interested in participating in further discussions.

Wireless expansion and management – Kevin and Bonnie

A tentative schedule was developed for the wireless project to implement the core services and expand wireless into some buildings. Installation of the core equipment and wireless management platform is scheduled to be complete early in February and the new light-weight access points in the buildings by end of March. Sometime in February we expect to migrate some of the existing autonomous access points to light-weight to be centrally managed. Student Government provided a prioritized list of buildings, including Nursing, Merrifield, Abbott, UpsonII, Witmer and Starcher. We expect to complete as many of these buildings as possible with existing funds.

STAGENet 2006 – Bonnie

A message from ITD was distributed this morning to inform NDUS of the proposed schedule and the expected outages during the state network upgrade. Saturday, December 16th, is the date for the cutovers to the new Dakota Carrier Network resilient packet ring backbone network. Messages will be sent out each night after the work is completed and the expectation is for the network to remain up for that day. During the prior upgrades for political sub-divisions and K12 networks, there have been some significant issues, particularly with IVN end-points. Everyone is encouraged to test after the upgrades are complete and to report all problems.

Northern Tier – Kevin and Bonnie

Planning is in progress with the Northern Tier Network Consortium (NTNC) to expand broadband networking opportunities for North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Idaho to support advanced research and education at reasonable costs. The Consortium expects that the network will utilize 10 Gigabit channels across its optical backbone with flexibility to easily add capacity as needed. NTNC proposes to acquire an optical fiber backbone from east to west and north to south across the region to allow major research institutions to connect to a regional optical fiber network and then to the national network. Primary projects at UND that were included in the report to benefit from NTNC included projects from the Center of Excellence in Life Sciences and Advanced Technologies, Center of Excellence for UAV and Simulation Applications, Energy & environmental Research Center’s Nation Center for Hydrogen Technology, Regional Weather Information Center, and Northern Plains Center for Behavioral Sciences. In addition to the approved DOD grant, state funding will be needed to acquire and manage the network segments. The draft report of the NTNC Technical Plan has not been posted on the web but anyone wanting a copy should call ITSS and request a hard copy.

Network updates

Renetta – The position to replace Josh Jones closes on Nov. 15th.

There are some issues being worked on related to the new private network. Nursing is looking forward to wireless network access being provided through the STF wireless project.

Brad – Presentations and power point slides from the UND Cyber Security Awareness Day are posted at safe.und.edu.

There is progress with some security related policies. A first draft of the incident response policy is complete and will be ready for review shortly. New policy groups will be developed for data protection and privacy to discuss what should be done to protect critical data.

The process of doing security assessments of information systems and servers on campus has begun. A trial assessment was done for the ImageNow application server. A steering group met and decided on 12 additional servers for the next round of assessments which are planned to be done over the next 3 months. More information is available at itsecurity.und.edu. A parallel HIPAA security assessment is being done for the School of Medicine and School of Nursing.

Dale – Storage for the Final Cut Pro editing system has been upgraded to XSAN, helping with moving programming between facilities. Programming can now be FTP’d within the Television Center and to the ASN Studio. Studio One is starting to be delivered in digital file format in the Denver area on their local access cable system, expanding visibility around the country. Rather than shipping a tape, soon it will be done as an MPEG2 file on a DVD, and will eventually be transmitted via FTP and be ready to air within hours of completion of programming. The file size of an hour of this programming is about 3 GB.

Live programming for UND events at the Alerus is done by renting a microwave link from WDAZ or KVLY, sending it to Ryan Hall, and then using internal fiber connections. Fiber from the Alerus to UND would simplify this process and make it more efficient.

Jay – For everyone’s awareness, there were a couple of occasions recently when the Norton personal firewall blocked port 80. It is difficult to uninstall Norton products from systems when problems occur.

Jing – CILT, with participation from other ITSS staff, are implementing LANDesk, management software for systems, in classrooms.

Jing questioned server based firewall options and alternatives to McAfee Entercept, now called McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention.

Don – The networking change made recently at the School of Medicine is providing the needed IP numbers.

Spam is increasing continually in spite of the efforts to control it.

The School of Medicine is responding to the direction from IVN to allow more than one certified video end-point at the remote medical campuses around the state with some testing. LifeSize Communications is going to provide a couple of codecs for evaluation. They will be tested at Minot and Bismarck as well as at some locations with lower bandwidth as an alternative to Polycom and Tandberg. A high definition MCU is coming out from Codian which will also be tested.

Tracy and Josh – Tracy announced that Josh Jones is the new Director of Technology at the School of Business and Public Administration. One of the upcoming challenges over the next couple of months will be implementation of the new Symon Target/Vision server. The goal is to be able to load video into it, as well as taking data sources from the web, to present information over the top of regular TV channels. Reuters will be going away in December.

Michelle – There are no new major projects coming up right now. Digital signage systems went into production in October. There are eleven plasma monitors in different locations.

Next meeting – December 12, 2006