Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

Windows 2000 Training

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UCI is one of 50 US colleges and universities who have been awarded a training grant by Microsoft Research and University Relations. This grant will cover a three-course program of focused training in the administration of Windows 2000 in a university environment.

The donated training is targeted to IT professionals working in schools and departments that are in the process of, or very near migrating to Microsoft’s new operating system.

Over spring break, NACS hosted Phase 1 “Planning and Installing Windows 2000 in a University Environment” for 15 System Analysts, Technical Services Managers and NT Support Specialists from a variety of departments and schools, including the College of Medicine, Biological Sciences, the UCI Libraries, The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, Social Ecology, and University Extension.

The second class will focus on integrating Windows 2000 with UCI network services (e.g., DNS) and the final class will focus on Windows 2000 security. These two courses will be conducted during Spring quarter.

New ECE Computing Lab

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Recently NACS helped the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) assemble a new computing lab for ECE majors.

The Computer Science and Engineering Instructional Laboratory comprises 32 “SunRay Appliance” Unix workstations and a four-processor server. The lab will also include a station running NACS’s PayPrint service for student printing. The creation of the new lab was driven by record enrollments in ECE and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering. The new facility will serve both as an instructional lab and a drop-in homework lab.

30 of the workstations are Sun Microsystems SunRay 100’s for student use. The other two are SunRay 1’s for use as teaching aids which can be connected to overhead projectors.

The SunRay appliances were selected for the lab because ECE found these systems allowed much lower per-seat administration costs than other options.

ECE and NACS wish to acknowledge a generous contribution from Sun Microsystems, which helped make the new lab possible.

New Computing Lab

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NACS has completed a new, very large instructional computing laboratory in the Multipurpose Science and Technology Building (MSTB). Officially opened on February 27, the lab has already been used by several UCI classes, and is available for Spring quarter courses.

The lab has an electrically operated partition so that it can be used as two 48-seat labs or one large 96-seat lab. The lab is equipped with Pentium III 733 Mhz systems with 256Mb of RAM — our fastest lab systems, capable of running the most demanding Windows applications.
Both sides of the lab have independently controlled state of the art projection systems that can be used together when a single class uses the entire facility.

The main purpose of the lab will be to support campus instructional activities. Either or both labs can be scheduled by contacting the NACS Response Center (email nacs@uci.edu). When not in use by reserved classes, the lab is available for drop-in use.

Lab hours are from 8 a.m. to midnight Sunday-Thursday and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Broadcast E-mail to Students

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With the support of the UCI Registrar, Network & Academic Computing Services provides a service to facilitate the distribution of academic information to large sets of UCI students. The “Student Electronic Broadcast System” (SEBS) provides mailing lists and delivery mechanisms to reach various categories of students.

With SEBS, authorized personnel can send e-mail to all students within a major, all students within a year (e.g. all sophomores), and several other useful categories. Lists are dynamically maintained using official UCI Registrar enrollment data so that schools and departments do not have to maintain and update their own lists.

The broadcast system was developed based on input from the campus, to meet academic information dissemination needs. More information can be found at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/sebs/

Web Hosting Service

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For the many faculty and staff who wish to develop Web sites, NACS offers computers and services to augment existing school and department resources. NACS has both Linux and Windows servers, in order to accommodate most Web development needs.

The machines are configured so that Web sites can be developed and maintained by the faculty/staff sponsor, by NACS staff, or cooperatively. A variety of Web server and Web development tools are available, native to either environment. The hosting service is economical, because several departments share the cost of acquiring and maintaining a single machine.

An on-staff Web developer is also available who is skilled in a wide array of Web technologies, including Perl, PHP, ASP and SQL.

More information can be found at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/support/webdev.html

Some recent sites which NACS has hosted and/or supported development:

Campuswide Honors program
http://www.honors.uci.edu/
Student Fee Advisory Committee
http://www.sfac.uci.edu/
Sexual Assault Survivors Alliance
http://www.sexualassaultsurvivors.org/