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Lyle Wiedeman

UCI Hosts IT Guidance Committee Meeting

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On Tuesday, May 2, 2006, UCI hosted the second meeting of the systemwide UC Information Technology Guidance Committee (ITGC).

The ITGC was established by the UC Office of the President to undertake an 18-month process of consulting with stakeholders at all the UC campuses. Its goal is to guide future UC investment in information technology to promote an effective academic information environment.

The formation of this committee recognizes the increasingly important role that information technology will play in sustaining the enhancing the University’s academic quality and competitiveness and in ensuring essential business effectiveness and efficiencies.

The meeting, held at Langston Library, consisted of three sessions: Infrastructure/Administration, Instructional and Student Computing, and Research Computing. A wide range of faculty and staff from throughout the campus attended. More information can be found at http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/itgc/

New Talent in NACS

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NACS would like to welcome Harry Mangalam to our Research Computing group, and announce that Isaac Straley has accepted the position of Interim Manager for our IT Security group.

Harry Mangalam earned his Ph.D. in Physiology/Pharmacology from UCSD, and has held positions at the Salk Institute, the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe, and at Acero, a Bay Area commercial bioinformatics company, as well as IT support positions within UCI’s College of Medicine and Earth Systems Sciences. Harry has been under the thrall of computers since the days when floppy disks really were big and floppy.

Harry’s position is a joint appointment, with half his time supporting Dr. Falko Kuester’s HIperwall project and the other half with NACS Research Computing, assisting faculty with their computational science needs.

Isaac Straley’s previous position was within the IT Security group he now leads. Prior to joining NACS, he owned his own consulting business, providing services to financial institutions famous for their attention to network and data security issues. His background includes both technical and management experience. He is also a life-long computer fanatic.

As Interim Manager of IT Security, he will be working with NACS and the campus to ensure a continued safe and reliable computing environment.

Computer Labs Aid Instruction

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You might think, in these days of ubiquitous laptops and wireless Internet, that the traditional instructional computer lab has had its day, but labs remain an essential resource for instruction at UCI.

Distributed through 9 rooms in six buildings, NACS manages over 300 computers dedicated to instructional use. NACS continuously invests in the lab computers to keep them current, and systems in any of our labs have a consistent, predictable configuration.

All lab computers have an array of academic and productivity software, and all labs have printing facilities (most through NACS’s Payprint system, and Gateway Study Center computers through the Library.)

Instructional labs fill two principal roles: allocation to faculty while teaching regularly scheduled courses, and “drop in” use. Some labs are always available for drop-in use, and all labs are available for drop-in use when not being used for a course.

Faculty interested in having a computing lab allocated to a course may make their request online.

In addition to course use and drop-in use, some of our computers are available at night as a computational resource. From 10pm to 7am, systems in the MST and SST buildings reconfigure themselves as a computational cluster. If you’re interested in access to this cluster, please contact NACS.

Instructional labs:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/labs/index.html#instruct

Request a lab for your course:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/labs/schedule.html

Drop-in labs:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/labs/index.html#drop

Email Authentication Extended

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Once a convenient alternative to leaving messages on an answering machine, email has become both an almost irreplaceable communication resource and an annoyingly exploited involuntary advertisement and network attack medium.

NACS has taken many measures to return email to a usable and trustworthy service, including aggressive spam filtering and restricting to UCI affiliates the ability to send using campus resources.

The latest step in the program was to require UCInetID authentication to use the campus email gateway “smtp.uci.edu” even when sending mail from on campus. This step was taken to prevent compromised systems from having free rein from inside the campus firewall to email spam and viruses.

This change does not affect people with departmental email servers which provide the SMTP service. It also does not affect users of the Webmail service.

By now most faculty and staff who need to have altered the configuration of their email program (for example, Eudora or Outlook) to “authenticate” (prove their identity with their UCInetID and password). Instructions for doing so can be found at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/authsmtp.html and the NACS response center (949-824-2222, nacs@uci.edu) remains available to help solve any residual problems.

Now You Know – NACS Web site resources

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The NACS Web site (www.nacs.uci.edu) allows faculty and staff to gain easy access to information about computing and networking services. This article surveys some of its features, but there are many more you can discover on your own.

Downtimes and problems report

The top item in the left-hand navigation is a “Systems Status” alert box. In it you can find which NACS services and resources have known problems, and any information we have about when to expect resolution.

Blocked list

The number one quick link in the right hand navigation bar is the “Blocked Systems List.” When a computer at UCI is being denied access to UCInet (and the Internet) because it represents a threat to the other systems on campus, it will be found in this list. If you are ever affected by this, NACS is ready to work with you to correct the problem.

Knowledgebase

A little further down on the list of top quick links is NACS’s “Knowledgebase – FAQ”, a collection of frequently-asked questions and answers, updated as issues of interest change.

Campus software licenses

The campus has arranged for discount licensing of a wide variety of academic and productivity software. The campus “Software Licensing Database” is easily accessed from the list of top quick links.

My E-mail Options

The left hand navigation bar includes a list of “service tools,” quick access to key on-line resources. Among those tools is “My Email Options” which allows users of NACS Mailbox services to check their disk quota or configure their email service (setting up a vacation message or tuning the selectiveness of the spam filter).This is but a sample of the information and tools readily available through the NACS Web site http://www.nacs.uci.edu . If you have suggestions for other NACS online resources you would like convenient access to, please contact NACS.