Internet Service to the campus for faculty and staff was briefly interrupted for about 90 minutes today. Services were restored by ATT approximately at noon. Our last Internet outage was in the Fall of 2006 for about an hour.
There was a short interruption of telephone service around 8:45 this morning for 5 minutes so that we could reboot the campus PBX system. Telephone services are up and running, while we continue to run diagnostics on
the switch to verify the integrity of all telephone systems.
Late yesterday afternoon some off-campus users were receiving busy signals which we determined was related to an equipment problem. Jim Early was able to diagnose and resolve the problem around 6pm. This morning we experienced a similar problem and rebooted the entire system. We do not expect further interruptions in telephone services.
Please report any telephone problems to Jim Early x6498, Gary Hunter x6059 or myself at x5471.
I apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience.
Randall Reynolds
Friday evening, October 21st, your ITS staff upgraded the campus server that hosts our blog software, MovableType. The new MT3.2 version includes better security, better spam filtering, and a host of new plug-ins.
Continue reading "Blogs at Belmont - An upgrade and an update" »
Friday night's scheduled upgrade of the faculty and staff email server went well according to Randy Capps, Networking Services Manager. The back-up process of all email on the server took 10 hours (that is a LOT of email, folks). The re-load took and additional 3 hours. Email was up and running by early afternoon on Saturday.
The problems reported so far have not been with the upgrade but with settings on personal computers. Some local or personal machines with pop-up blocking softeware may automatically block your ability to compose or reply-to an email. Here is what to do if you experience that problem:
In Internet Explorer, hold down the Control Key (Ctrl) and hit compose mail or reply-to and a window will open for your composition or response
In Firefox, if you attempt to compose a message or reply-to a message, you may get a warning message telling you that a pop-up has been blocked. Follow the instructions from that warning message to add mail.belmont.edu to a list of sites from which you will allow pop-ups.
Thank-you's go to Randy Capps and Dave Elder for their efforts on this essential upgrade.
Network Services upgraded Belmont's Internet pipe from 15mb to 21mb this morning at 6am. Randy Capps, Network Services manager, worked with Bellsouth to reconfigure the connection and brought up the new service for the campus. Our connection to the Internet was down about 5 minutes with the change over. Our plan is install a new service for Resnet sometime in the next couple of months. Our goal is to provide the best Internet service for a growing campus. Congrats to Randy Capps on a great job in making this happen.
With the full understanding that there is never a good time to take down the e-mail server for Belmont faculty and staff, we have a narrow window between Friday night's graduation/commencement and the beginning of school to make a necessary upgrade in the hardware that handles all mail.belmont.edu accounts. The plan is as follows:
At 10:00PM Friday, August 12th, the mail server for faculty and staff will go offline. Faculty & staff mail should be back online by 5:00PM Saturday afternoon, August 13th.
Access to the Internet, BIC, BannerWeb, WebCT, and student email (pop.belmont.edu accounts) will NOT be affected.
Any incoming mail to your faculty or staff account will be temporarily stored until the new hardware is online. At that time, any mail received during the downtime will be released to the appropriate accounts.
We apologize for any inconvenience this causes, however, this is an essential upgrade to support our ever increasing demands in e-mail processing.
A major upgrade to the campus library software, Endeavor, was installed this week. The update was required to keep the library up-to-date with changes to Endeavor. Endeavor supports the major activities of the Library including collections management. Kudos go out to Michael Davis for a job well done and on time. The system was down for almost two days and came online Thursday.
The campus voicemail system was upgraded last weekend. The upgrade brings our system up to Velocity level, more disk space and mailboxes. This was an essential upgrade to support the growth in the number of residential students on campus.
Technology Services upgraded the old 10 foot dish on top of Massey with a new Satellite dish. The upgrade was in preparation for Belmont's participate with MTSU Department of Social Work. Belmont's Department of Social WOrk, Assistant Professor Dr. Lorraina Scholten, is coordinating Belmont's participation in the project with MTSU. The new satellite system can receive a wide array of signals and replaces the old dish which was installed in the late 1980s. The project was coordinated by Jim Early and Robert Dillingham.
We resolved a problem with our faculty and staff email server this morning around 11am. Problems with the server began early this today(around 2am) and we were able to reindex the site first thing this morning. Student email was not affected and everything else including Internet and Banner continue to be available.
The network and telecommunications network had a great year. Our actual downtime for our services was virtually non-existent. Technology staff have worked hard to build in protection from power outages and react very quickly when there is a problem such as a potential virus loose on the network. Our Internet pipe (15mb) with Bellsouth was up 100% for the last year. Over the last few years we have installed very sophisticated firewalls to protect the campus. This summer we entered into a relationship with a local email vendor to screen out spam email. In November alone we screened over 234,000 spam emails.
In 2003 we installed Bluesocket firewall to authenticate wireless users and protect the campus network. We are currently implementing a new network service for RESNET called Perfigo which will help students automatically patch and upgrade their XP systems in the rooms before using Belmont's network. So far, with the new service installed in the five major residential halls on campus, we have seen an improvement in students keeping up with patches and virus protection on their personal computers and laptops.
Below are the uptime rates by service area:
1. Network uptime between the hours of 8:00 and 5:00 is 99.94 % (2 hours downtime/ 3285hours)
2. Network uptime based on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is 99.91 % (8 hours downtime / 8760 hours
3. Telephone System----99.98%
4. Long Distance-------98% (old vendor now replaced by Bellsouth on Dec 16th because of downtime)
5. Voicemail----------99.99%
6. Email Systems for faculty, staff and students ---- 100%
6. Library System---- 100%
We will cut over long distance telephone service for faculty and staff on Wednesday at noon this week, December 15th. You should not experience more then a 2-5 minute lapse in service during the cutover. The process of making a long distance call on campus will be the same for the new service with Bellsouth. (i.e. dial 701 , your number, and then your 6 digit authorization code). Our cost for long distance with Bellsouth will decrease to 3.25 cents a minute as compare to 4.5 cents with our old vendor which represents a 28% savings for departments. If you have not picked up a replacement travel card for off-campus usage, please contact Jim Early at x6498 before Thursday.
At Belmont we have a wonderful resource in the campus telephone directory. As our campus grows we need a centralized resource so that staff and faculty telephone, address and email information can be found easily. Each fall we encourage everyone to verify their information and submit updates as needed. Instructions on how to do this are as follows:
If you have any questions about updating your information please contact Jim Early, in Telecommunications: 460-6498.
For those of you with access to CATV, Comcast has made a change in their lineup. Channel 7 (Fox tv) and Channel 6 have been swapped, so that Fox is now on channel 6. Please reprogram your televisions accordingly. The Belmont TV's that formerly carried BTV channel 65 will be reprogrammed by Telecommunications.
As of June 30th Belmont re-signs a 3 year contract with Bellsouth for local telephone service. The new contract reduces our cost for local telephone services by 15%. The campus cost for local telephone service with Bellsouth has decreased by almost 50% over the last 5 years which represents a great value for the campus. Currently, the campus supports over 2400 telephones, alarms and other devices that require a local telephone circuit. All of the savings have come during a remarkable time of campus growth.
Networking Services has implemented a new solution for reducing the amount of email spam on campus. As you are aware email spam has become a growing nusiance over the last two years. We have contracted with a local company, Sublime, to screen our campus mail for known spam. We have had this in place since June. Currently, we are blocking about 100,000 pieces of spam a week. If you have any questions about this project contact Randy Capps x5448.
We are making several changes to the campus cable TV network or BTV this week. We are fusion splicing all cable TV routes to improve reception as well as moving the Campus Radio Station to the new Convergent Media Space. The campus may experience some downtime on Monday, August 9th and Tuesday, August 10th as work commences.