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Expanded Wireless Coverage

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Wireless networking continues to be a popular means of accessing UCInet around campus. NACS staff are working hard to install wireless access points, as requested by schools, in the classrooms and common areas where they are most needed. This newsletter will periodically report on new locations as they are built.

Here is a list of some of the latest places where wireless stations have been installed. You may also consult the map athttp://www.nacs.uci.edu/ucinet/mobile/locations.html for information on wireless availability. It should be noted that this list represents UCInet Mobile Access sites, all of which can be used once you have registered your wireless card. There are other access points set up and maintained by individuals which are usually not intended for general use.

  • Humanities Hall 262
  • Tamkin Student Lecture Building (Med Sci “F”) 
    – Lecture Hall “A” (rm F110) 
    – Lecture Hall “B” (rm F114)
  • Bren Event Center 
    – Koll conference room (rm 103) 
    – Stewart conference room (rm 220)
  • Engineering Tower room 201
  • Engineering Lecture Hall room 110
  • Humanities Instructional Bldg room 110
  • Engineering Lecture Hall room 110
  • Physical Sciences
    – Physical Science Classrooms B rooms 120 & 230
    – Rowland Hall, rooms 101,104,108,114 and 188
    – Multipurpose Science and Technology, room 214
  • Steinhaus Lecture Hall room 134
  • Engineering Gateway/ECE Department 
    – room s2200 
    – all rooms on 2nd floor, west wing 
    – all rooms on 3rd floor, west wing
  • Social Sciences
    – Social Science plaza (between pod A, B and C) 
    – Social Science Tower plaza(between SSL and SST) 
    – Social Science Lab, rooms 140 and 248
  • Social Ecology 2 Lecture Hall room 1304

If you have a suggestion of a place on campus where wireless access
would be useful, please e-mail nacs@uci.edu.

Laser Link to North Campus

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North Campus has been connected to UCInet via a new 100 megabit/second (Mbps) laser link connection. The TereScope 3000, from Optical Access, provides a full-duplex connection at more than sixty-five times the bandwidth of the previous 1.5 Mbps microwave connection. In addition to the higher bandwidth laser link, a backup 11 Mbps network connection has been installed using 802.11b wireless Ethernet. (The laser can suffer degradation in extremely foggy conditions.)

The new link improves the transfer of data between the two sites to keep up with increasing demand as well as to address the problem of legacy equipment no longer supported by the manufacturer. The laser solution was chosen over trenching cable to North Campus which would have entailed three times the cost. The laser employs an “eye safe” beam which will not harm creatures straying into its path.

This upgrade improves the networking capabilities of the Air Pollution Labs, Facilities Management, the Arboretum, the College of Medicine’s Child Development Center, and other North Campus organizations.

Border Router

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UCI now has a versatile border router providing a more configurable and secure connection to the Internet.

The border router is a Cisco Catalyst 6509 with a crossbar-fabric switch. The router currently features 32 ports, each running at one gigabit per second (1 Gbit/s) bidirectionally, and is expandable to 180 ports as campus needs grow. It replaces a router with a total bandwidth of 2.4 Gbit/s and represents a substantial upgrade in network capacity.

The border router now aggregates formerly separate circuits to CalREN, the Internet, and Internet2 (Abilene), allowing a single set of policies and security measures to protect the campus across all our links to the rest of the world.

The router is a sophisticated device that allows network administrators to build circuits into, out of, and even back into the router. This permits a virtual path from the Internet to the router, through the campus firewall, back through the router, and on to UCInet. The border router also will support an “intrusion detection system”, presently being designed and implemented, which will complement and enhance the campus firewall.

The intrusion detection system will be able to spot subtle patterns in campus network traffic which represent a network-based attack. It will alert campus network staff when an attack begins, and allow the creation of precise rule sets for network traffic, which will allow UCInet to remain open to legitimate network uses while filtering out many kinds of hostile traffic.

Housing Telecommunications/Network Upgrade — a.k.a. “Light Every Pillow” —

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UCI Housing Administrative Services (Housing) and NACS are working together to create the telecommunications and network infrastructure UCI residential students will need in the first years of the 21st century.

When completed, every “pillow” in the six residential communities on campus will have access to a 10-Mbit/s Switched Ethernet connection and support for multiple telephone lines. The project will provide residential students with their own Gigabit Ethernet backbone. The residential network will use the same technologies comprising the main campus backbone, to which it will be redundantly connected, and which will provide Internet access to the residences.

To date, one node of the two node backbone has been completed and the new infrastructure and network connections are complete in Mesa Court. This complements the network connectivity that existed prior to this project in Arroyo Vista, Palo Verde and Middle Earth Phase Two. By the end of Spring 2000, the infrastructure implementation will be complete in Campus Village, Verano Place and Middle Earth Phase One.

In the Fall, the network will be extended to Middle Earth Phase Three which is currently under construction. The long-term goal is to upgrade the older network equipment in Arroyo Vista, Palo Verde and Middle Earth Phase Two, and to connect all Housing networks directly to the Housing backbone network.

Backbone Upgrade

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NACS completed the implementation of a new campus network backbone in September when the last UCI buildings were switched to it from the old backbone. The new, Gigabit, fault-tolerant backbone core connects UCI’s approximately 350 Local Area Networks (LANs), and provides the underpinnings required for further improvement of performance on these LANs. The most immediate effect of the backbone upgrade is an improvement in building-to-building communication and centralized server performance. Campus services such as DCSlib, EEE, E4E and the campus Web server are now on “fat pipes” to the new backbone.

At a cost of slightly under $1.5 million, the project — completed within budget and on time — brings the campus network:

  • at least a ten-fold improvement in backbone bandwidth with the capacity to support growing campus network demands;
  • a more robust and maintainable backbone;
  • the flexibility to upgrade building-to-building communications to gigabit speeds;
  • additional fiber around the campus to support new growth;
  • the ability to run newer versions of network software;
  • Y2K compliance.

NACS continues to make progress on “network edge upgrades” for departmental networks, which are facilitated by the new backbone. The design and planning stage of the School of Engineering network upgrade is now complete, and we will soon be starting to plan the upgrade in the school of Biological Sciences.