Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

You are here: Home / Archives for Dana Roode

Dana Roode

Telephone/Radio Consulting

by

Did you know that NACS has a wide variety of telephone sets and related features available to the campus? We are here to serve your individual department’s needs. We are happy to make a site visit to your department to review your service needs and to help you select the features that can make your job easier. If you have the services you need, but are unsure of how to use the telephone and voice mail systems to the fullest extent, we offer training free of charge. Please contact NACS Telephone Customer Service at (949) 82-5123 to request a consultation or to sign up for training.

Departments using 800Mhz radios as part of their daily communications can benefit greatly from a consultation with our 800Mhz radio system specialist. He will meet with you to review the current programming in your radios, and he will ask questions to determine what programming changes would enhance the functionality of your radios specific to your department needs. In addition, we offer training from the basic daily use of the radio system, including handy system features, as well as specialized training for radio use in an emergency. Please contact Brian Chrisman at (949) 82-5123 for more information.

Internet2 at UCI

by

Faculty sometimes ask “When will I get access to Internet2?” or “How can I use Internet2?”

UCI has been benefiting from connection to Internet2 since last spring when UCI connected to CENIC’s new backbone network. You access Internet2 automatically, whenever it makes sense.

UCI’s Internet Service Provider, CENIC, manages the California Research and Education Network, CalREN. CalREN now comprises several networks to allow the right combination of reliability and performance, depending on the application. You can review CalREN’s tiered network services at http://www.cenic.com/calren/index.htm

CalREN DC is the basic, robust network. Through CalREN DC, UCI reaches California educational institutions, as well as the commercial Internet. (From UCI, there are separate pipelines to these two destinations, so that research traffic to Stanford doesn’t compete with, say, staff purchasing office supplies from staples.com).

CalREN HPR is a parallel, high-performance network which is, in a sense, a sub-component of the Internet2 network. This is because all traffic destined to or coming from Internet2 sites will traverse HPR to get to UCI and other UC campuses. CalREN uses HPR to prove new network services and protocols which, once they have become commodities, migrate to CalREN DC. For example, QOS (quality of service), a protocol for guaranteed sustained bandwidth, is being deployed and tested on the Internet2 network and on CalREN HPR.

UCI’s border router is responsible for distributing network traffic among the possible networks: the two pipes to CalREN DC, the one to CalREN HPR, as well as duplicates of those three channels to a backup network node in the event our primary connection fails. When a network application requires or will benefit from routing to Internet2, it just happens!

NACS is presently involved in a backbone upgrade project which will improve the primary campus pathways to CalREN HPR and thus to Internet2. (refer to the Fall 2004 NACS newsletter, online at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/moreinfo/ ) This upgrade will also benefit routine network activities for most users on the campus.

New Features Sharpen Popular EEE Tools

by

UCI’s Electronic Educational Environment (EEE) includes several new enhancements to the Class Mailing List and Mailing List Editor tools.

The Class Mailing List tool provides instructors with an automatically generated, near real-time list, that contains e-mail addresses for all students enrolled in a class. The Mailing List Editor allows instructors to configure their list, add alternate e-mail addresses, add extra e-mail addresses and make other changes.

Previously, instructors would have to wait 24 hours for updates to their Class Mailing List. Now a Class Mailing List reflects adds or drops in just 2 hours. Additions of TAs and other assistants now occur immediately. Other improvements to the Class Mailing List and Editor include:

  • All e-mail is virus scanned
  • Targeted error messages to aid in self-troubleshooting
  • Faster response and delivery
  • New and improved Mailing List Archive look
  • Quarterly Announcement e-mails have been consolidated. Instructors will get one e-mail with all available list addresses (Classes associated later will result in a subsequent e-mail)

The EEE Web development team continues to improve the system based on feedback from students and instructors. For more information on new and upcoming features, see http://eee.uci.edu/news.

ESMF Open to Campus Researchers

by

UCI’s Earth System Modeling Facility (ESMF) offers accounts to all UCI researchers and students interested in High Performance Computing. The ESMF presently consists of a cluster of 88 IBM Power4 CPUs in seven 8-way and one 32-way SMP nodes running AIX 5.1L. The Visual Age compilers fully support OpenMP and MPI. The computational environment is batch-oriented and is suitable for large- scale numerical simulations. The environment is similar to that found at many national supercomputer centers, but, we hope, with less bureaucracy. Instructions for obtaining an ESMF account are at

http://www.ess.uci.edu/esmf/accounts.html

Idle ESMF CPU time is a waste and the goal is to minimize it. We have constructed a batch queue environment which gives priority to the earth-systems simulations which are its primary task, and places other jobs in queues of lower priority (standby queues). This allows other UCI researchers to benefit from idle CPU time without penalizing ESMF’s core users.

Radio Systems Specialist

by

Brian Chrisman

Brian Chrisman

In 2002, Network and Academic Computing Services (NACS) created the Radio Systems Specialist position, in order to better serve our clients. The new position consolidated management of the 800MHz radio system and cellular carriers’ cell sites on campus, responsibilities which at that time were shared among several NACS staff. Brian Chrisman was hired to fill the new position.

Brian was previously employed by the Motorola vendor that maintains the radio infrastructure on campus. He was able to transition into the new position quickly because of prior experience with UCI’s 800MHz radio system.

Brian has diverse responsibilities, but some key ones are:

  • 800 MHz radio system administration, vendor coordination, performance analysis, and system maintenance/upgrades.
  • Customer service, analysis of campus radio needs for daily operations and emergency use, communications consulting, and radio training for campus departments.
  • Assessment of need for additional cell sites on campus with campus administration. Coordination with all responsible parties for planning and construction of sites.

Brian Chrisman is available on campus Monday through Friday. He can be reached at (949) 824-8151 or bchrisma@uci.edu for assistance with campus radio communications.

Please visit the radio area on the NACS web page at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/network/ for additional information.