Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

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Voice and Data Services

Improvements to Cellular Coverage

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NACS is working with Sprint Nextel to improve Sprint PCS coverage on the main campus.  Sprint Nextel is adding Sprint PCS equipment to the existing Nextel site located at Engineering Tower.  This should improve in-building coverage for Sprint where it has been poor.

NACS and other campus departments are also working with AT&T (formerly Cingular) to construct a new cell site that will be located on the rooftop of the Science Library.   This site will bring coverage to the western portion of the campus in an effort to restore coverage to UCI’s AT&T users.  Cingular sold their interest in the joint venture network to T-Mobile when Cingular bought AT&T Wireless assets a few years ago.  Since then, their two sites on campus have only carried T-Mobile traffic, which had a negative impact on AT&T/Cingular coverage at UCI.

In addition to these two projects, NACS is developing a “master plan” for future cell site installations to bring new carriers on board, and add better coverage to existing carriers that have sites on the campus.  One idea that we are evaluating is a distributed antenna system or DAS.  This system, installed by a third party, leverages advances in technology to deploy small “microcell” nodes that are fed by fiber optic cable back to a central distribution point on our campus.  The DAS system has a very small profile compared to the sites that exist on campus today.  This solution can work better in our environment, improving in-building coverage and adding carriers without the challenge of finding a rooftop or other space for several hundred square feet of equipment and large antenna arrays.  In some cases, the antennas can be completely hidden, with attendant aesthetic benefits.

In this information age, NACS understands the desire of many to be mobile, whether it’s simply a cell phone, PDA, or data card for their laptop.  We will continue to work with cellular carriers to implement better coverage on campus.

Three Common Questions

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I have been assigned a phone number that was used by my predecessor, but I can’t get into Infomail (voice mail).  How do I get the password reset?

Please fill out a Service Request Form (SRF) http://www.nacs.uci.edu/service-request/ and specify in the comments section that you need an Infomail password reset. There is a $10 charge to reset the Infomail password. It is reset to the default password (the phone’s 5-digit extension).  This will normally happen the same business day.

What email programs can I use with my NACS email account and how do I configure them?

NACS offers a web-based email program at http://webmail.uci.edu and supports many common desktop email programs. A list of desktop email programs, including Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Outlook, and Eudora, with configuration instructions is available from http://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/settings.html.

What is a ‘Corporate Time’ or ‘Oracle Calendar’ account?  Why do I need one?  What is my password?  How much does it cost?

‘Corporate Time’ is the former name of the campus-wide calendaring service NACS supports.  Since being purchased by Oracle, it has been renamed ‘Oracle Calendar’.

Oracle Calendar allows its users to keep track of tasks, reminders, and meetings (like a planner/organizer), but adds the functionality of viewing and interacting with other users’ accounts, which allows joint planning and collaboration, even between members of different departments.

Many units on campus use Oracle Calendar as their scheduling tool. You can obtain your password by contacting the NACS response center at (949) 824-2222 (extension 42222 on campus).

The cost is $7.00 annually per account, payable by recharge.

For more information, please see our Oracle Calendar web page at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/calendar/

NACS Shares at ACUTA

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Bruce Cotsonas, NACS Project Coordinator, and Todd Strand, NACS Infrastructure Engineer, co-presented at the 35th annual ACUTA conference and exhibition in San Diego on July 27th. (ACUTA is an association for communications technology professionals in Higher Education.)

In their presentation, “Visual Documentation and the Installation of Communications Infrastructure”, Bruce and Todd demonstrated the use of “visual documentation” (also known as “visual scope of work”) to portray telecommunications infrastructure before and after installation projects on the UCI campus.

Google Earth (TM) satellite photography of UCI building sites and digital photographs of construction details as well as text and other graphics were imported into Power Point presentations. The resulting “visual documentation” helps to reduce ambiguity and clarify the reasons for infrastructure work, solutions to problems, conduit location and excavation, cable pulling/splicing/termination, and the transferring of services.

Bruce Cotsonas coordinates NACS cabling projects with clients, vendors and staff. He is a member of ACUTA, BICSI, CSI and DBIA, and he has over twenty-one years of experience in project management.

Todd Strand designs, plans, and provides cost estimates during communications infrastructure projects. He holds the Registered Communications Distribution Designer, Network Transport Systems Specialist, and Outside Plant Specialist certifications from BICSI.

Bruce and Todd work for Diane Dunn, Manager of NACS’s Communications Planning Group, which plans and manages all campus-wide network and telecommunications infrastructure projects.

Register your Server

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As the number and severity of security challenges continues to grow, NACS works hard to ensure that UCInet remains a useful, robust, and safe place to work. Towards that end, NACS now offers campus units the opportunity to block incoming network connections to their systems. Connections initiated from systems on your network will continue to work, so typical usage such as web browsing, email, instant messaging, and so forth, will be unaffected.

In order to support those services on your systems that do rely on incoming connections (such as web servers), NACS offers server registration. Using a simple form, you can identify which systems, and which services on those systems, need to be accessible from off-campus.

A number of departments are already using server registration in conjunction with inbound connection blocking in order to improve the security of their environments with great success. It is a good idea to begin using server registration, even if you are not yet contemplating inbound connection blocking. To learn more, or to get started, please visit:

http://www.nacs.uci.edu/network/servers/

UCInet Backbone Upgrade Complete

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As part of an ongoing effort to keep UCInet up to date and able to meet the research and instructional needs of the campus, NACS is pleased to announce the completion of the network backbone upgrade.

The upgrade consisted of replacing and configuring the routers in the four core sites as well as upgrading UCI’s border router. Collectively UCI now enjoys a 10 gigabit (10 billion bits per second) redundantly connected backbone core, including two 10-gigabit connections to the border router and two to the Calit2 building.

Some schools such as Engineering, ICS, Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences, and parts of the College of Medicine, already have Gigabit Ethernet (1 billion bits per second) connections to the backbone and will see an immediate speed boost in some applications.

The next network upgrade project will focus on the “distribution layer” which will allow many of the remaining buildings at UCI to take advantage of the high-performance network backbone. In addition to the increase in network transfer speeds, NACS looks forward to helping the campus use this new architecture for future network protocols and applications.

After the current distribution layer upgrade is complete, there will still be UCI building network equipment and cabling that requires upgrade over coming years. NACS will work with the administration to determine a funding source and timeline for these projects.