New collaborations between the students, Residence Life, the College Union, and Information Technology Services (ITS) have resulted in two new computer facilities formally unveiled on Tuesday, January 17. Using various avenues, students have, over the years, expressed the need for easier and more distributed access to computers and printers across campus. To fully understand and respond to student requests for more computers and printers in distributed locations across campus, we entered into discussions with the students, Residence Life, and the Union in autumn of 2005. The discussions were productive and two new locations for computers and printers were identified.

New Facilities
ITS staff worked hard over the Winter break to deploy the new computing facilities on the fourth floor of the Campus Center and in an under-utilized TV lounge on the third floor of Tomlinson Hall. The fourth floor of the Campus Center is now home to 10 computers – eight of them are on desks in the main open area and two are tucked away near the fireplace on the same level. The printer for these computers is located on the third floor near the elevator. We believe this new facility will enable groups of students to collaborate more easily by providing an environment where they can congregate easily and still have access to a rich set of information resources. The Tomlinson location is now home to eight computers and a laser printer. Students have access to the Campus Center computers anytime the building is open and 24/7 CatCard access to the Tomlinson facility.

Improved Access
With the addition of the computers in Union and Tomlinson, ITS provides and maintains 104 computers in public computing facilities. The vast majority of these computers (77 to be precise) are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The other 27 are available based on the hours of the library and Chambers. Another 120 computers are available in the Science instructional labs and Language Resource Center. These computers are available until 1:00AM in the Chambers, Watson, Dana, and Martin buildings.

Ubiquitous Computing
The need for more distributed computing and printing resources has been largely driven by the rapid growth in the use of electronic resources (Blackboard, library databases, the web) in teaching, learning, and research at Davidson. ITS has anticipated and responded to these trends well by making ubiquitous computing a central focus of our technology planning for the campus. Today all major campus buildings are interconnected by a fiber-based Gigabit backbone network that provides high-speed access to the rich set of information resources at Davidson and beyond. While much work remains in the area of wireless networking, important strides have been made. Wireless connectivity now extends to the Campus Center (including patios), Library, Chambers, Sloan (including North and East lawns), Vail, Watson, Dana, Martin, Patterson Court as well as a few others locations scattered across campus. Here is a full list of wireless locations on campus.

Campus technology planning is largely driven by the input we receive from you as our clients. We do like to hear from you and look to you for answers to the following questions:

What do you, our clients, want to accomplish with information technology?
How will your IT needs change over time?
What do you like about what is currently available to you?
What do you need that is not currently offered?

To combat the pervasive problem of spam, ITS implemented PureMessage in May of last year. PureMessage scans email coming in from the Internet and assigns a spam score to each message. Messages that receive a spam score that falls within the spam threshold as defined on the server are quarantined, and messages that receive a spam score below that level are delivered to your inbox.

Fortunately, PureMessage has helped tremendously with the spam problem. Server statistics indicate that, on average, PureMessage has determined that approximately 60% of all email from off campus is spam. However, spam continues to be a problem. Even with the Outlook junk email filter enabled, spam still sometimes makes it to your inbox.

As another layer of protection from spam, ITS will be implementing the Exchange Intelligent Message filter on Monday, January 23. This filter will scan messages that either did not get scanned by PureMessage because they were sent to a distribution list, or messages that received a spam score lower than the PureMessage threshold defined on the server. Messages passing through the Intelligent Message Filter are assigned a “Spam Confidence Level" (SCL) which ranges from 0 (unlikely to be spam) to 9 (very likely to be spam). Initially, the SCL on the server will be set to 9. This should ensure that only the messages that are most likely to be spam will get sent to your junk email folder. This is how the Intelligent Message Filter will work:

If a message receives an SCL of 9, the Intelligent Message Filter checks the recipient’s safe senders list as defined in Outlook 2003 or OWA and then one of two things happen:

If the sender is on the recipient’s safe senders list, the message is delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
If the sender is not on the safe senders list or if no safe senders list is defined, the message is delivered to the recipients junk email folder.
If a message receives an SCL below 9, the Intelligent Message Filter checks the recipient’s blocked senders list as defined in Outlook 2003 or OWA and then one of two things happen:

If the sender is on the recipient’s blocked senders list, the message is delivered to the recipient’s junk email folder
If the sender is not on the blocked senders list or if no blocked senders list is defined, the message is delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
ITS will be monitoring and fine-tuning both PureMessage and the Intelligent Message Filter in an attempt to further reduce spam. Stay tuned for more information and details as they becomes available.

For this process to work correctly each user must have junk mail filtering turned on. Office 2003 users have this option turned on by default. Entourage, Office 2000, and OWA users will need to turn on this filter via OWA by following the steps outlined in the online kb article.

Don't forget to sign up for Unified Messaging...a free service! Unified Messaging (also referred to as ‘voice mail/email integration’ or UM) is the process of moving voice messages into email. The voice messages are converted to sound (.wav) files and can be listened to from your desktop via Outlook (internal or external speakers/sound card required). However, if you prefer, you can still listen to new voice mail messages over the phone. Here are a few things to know about Davidson’s Unified Messaging service.

UM is available for Windows or Mac clients.

UM requires no additional software for the Mac. After your voice mail is UM-enabled, you will begin to receive your voice messages in your Entourage inbox.

Client software installation is required for Windows. The install only takes 5 to 10 minutes. Detailed instructions will be sent to you after your request has been processed.

The telephone message waiting light works inconsistently -- sometimes it lights, sometimes it doesn't. When a message is left in voice mail, it is immediately moved to the email server. The email server then sends a signal back to the voice mail server to light the phone light. The message movement and the email notification are consistent -- unfortunately, the telephone lights are not.

The email server becomes the primary storage location for voice mail messages -- a copy is retained on the voice mail server for quick telephone access. Stored voice messages become part of your email quota (they don’t take up much space, though). Please note, if you delete a message from your Inbox it is also deleted from voice mail and vice versa. You can now manage your voice mail the same way you manage your email.

Although you can receive your voice mail in email, you cannot retrieve your email from voice mail. ‘Text-to-speech’ conversion is not available at Davidson at this time.

Additional sources for information:
Check out the ITS Knowledge Base.
If you’d like to request UM, an on-line Help Desk form has been developed to speed the process.

If I told you that I could surgically enhance you so that you could breathe with 10% less effort and the procedure was mostly safe and very inexpensive, would you have it done? If I told you that it involved drilling a hole directly in your chest and putting a tube directly from your lungs to the outside of your body, would you have it done? If I threw in a bit of window screening on the outside of the tube to keep big bugs from flying into your lung, would that ease your mind a little?

An extra hole might sound good if you have a stuffy nose. Nonetheless, I think I would decline. Although it would keep out the houseflies, the screen would let in a few gnats and millions of microorganisms every minute. I would have a perpetual case of pneumonia. I’d even have to clean lint out of my lungs. Does this sound disgusting enough already?

This scenario is similar to how we have run our Internet connection in the past. We have a firewall to keep unwanted intrusions out. We have Intrusion Prevention Systems and we have various methods of securely coming in to campus. But until recently we have gotten people access from off-campus by putting a hole in the firewall defenses (drilling a hole in the lung).

Now, however, we have ways of getting you onto campus that hit the target and only the target. Secure Remote Access (VPN; secure Outlook client, also called RPC over HTTP; and WebDAV) is now in place. People can connect into the network while keeping their transactions safe and private and protecting the college’s data and yours from prying eyes and intruders. People are signing up to use them in droves. Almost everyone who has a hole in the firewall for their individual use is switching to one of our Secure Remote Access methods. All the defenses that we have in place for the Internet can now do their jobs—keeping out the bad stuff and letting you in. Breathe.

Starting January 16, 2006 all Dell laptops purchased through ITS will come standard with a new wireless network card, the Intel Pro 2200. This wireless network card allows for a stronger signal, greater wireless range and a more intuitive user interface. The Intel Pro 2200 wireless network card replaces the Dell True Mobile wireless network card.

Following a successful test period last semester, ITS is ready to begin deployment of Mac OS X 10.4, also known as Tiger. This newest version of Apple's operating system offers an array of new and improved features, from better Windows interoperability to Widgets. Along with the new operating system, ITS will provide an improved version of our ADmitMac login software.

Minimum system requirements for getting Tiger your Mac are: 450MHz or faster G4, 512MB of RAM, and a 10GB or larger hard disk, with at least 5GB free. The upgrade will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis, and Tiger will now come standard with all new Macintosh computers. At this time, Tiger is classified as a noncritical update -- none of the features it provides are required for campus computing.

If you're interested in discussing an upgrade to Tiger, please contact Brian Little or the Help Desk.

Apple Computer began a two-year transition from PowerPC to Intel CPUs last week with the announcement of the MacBook Pro and the Intel iMac. This transition process is expected to last well into 2007. ITS is looking into acquiring one of the new models for testing.

With respect to software, finalizing the transition may take longer. Apple currently provides a technology called Rosetta, which allows PowerPC-based software to run under OS X for Intel. Predictably, this involves a reduction in performance. While we have not actually seen this firsthand, the numbers being bruited about are in the 30% range. With this in mind, users of high-performance computing applications, graphics software, and similar CPU-intensive programs should consider waiting until their software is converted fully to Intel before looking into a switch to the new hardware.

For standard and supported applications like Office, performance under Rosetta is said to be acceptable — a claim ITS will verify as soon as possible. Thus far, the only campus application known to not work at all under the Rosetta compatibility package is VirtualPC, which Microsoft has committed to updating.

Apple is, thus far, not forcing the transition. The new Intel-based units are being offered alongside their predecessor G4- and G5-based machines. ITS will test the new products thoroughly, and will notify the campus community when they are available as supported computers.

If you are backing up your computer with the Maxtor OneTouch drive, you should check at least once a month to ensure your backups are taking place.

To check if your backups are running on a Dell with Windows XP: click Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Scheduled Tasks. Locate your Weekly Backup task and ensure the “Last Run Time” date listed is no later than 3 weeks ago. If your system indicates a date older than 3 weeks ago, please email the Help Desk and request that someone check your backups.

The Mac backup is an exact duplicate of the user's home directory, so verifying is just a matter of checking that the contents of the backup drive match the contents of the backup source (i.e. the home directory). You can also open SilverKeeper and look at the Status tab for a summary of the date and outcome of the backup attempt.

If you do not have a Maxtor OneTouch drive, please email your request to the Help Desk. This option is available to both Mac and Windows XP users. If your computer's operating system is Windows 2000 and if it has a Davidson College property tag over 4000 you will need to upgrade to Windows XP prior to the installation of your Maxtor drive. You will need to submit both a Maxtor drive request and a Windows XP upgrade. Please use davidson\username when prompted.

Several incidents have been reported to ITS that students are unable to access the campus network. We have discovered that a wireless access point is giving out bad network addresses and causing users not to be able to gain access to the Davidson network.

If you have recently purchased or received a wireless access point, do not connect the device to the network. If you have any questions or concerns, please email ResNet.

Also, please take moment to review the Davidson College RF policy, which states: Faculty, Staff or Students shall not deploy their own production wireless systems because of the security, consistency and interference problems that would entail. ITS reserves the right to restrict any wireless system deployment.

Over winter break, Information Technology Services, the Union, and Residence Life collaborated to make two new computing facilities available to the Davidson student body. The fourth floor of the Knobloch Campus Center (KCC) now offers 10 computers...8 on desks out in the main area and 2 next to the fireplace on that level. The printer for these computers is located on the third floor near the elevator. The four kiosk stations and the Library computers in the Union will now also print to the printer on the third floor.

Additionally, the Residence Life office graciously offered the third floor TV lounge in Tomlinson (a space that was under-utilized) to ITS at the end of last semester. There are now 8 computers and a laser printer in that location.

Students will have access to the KCC computers anytime it is open and will have 24/7 CatCard access to the Tomlinson Facility.

The computers and printer that are in the KCC were moved from the Belk Mini Lab. We decided to close that facility after a long series of water problems threatened the health and safety of students working in that area. The large lab in Belk, the Student Computing Center, is still open 24/7 and students can use their CatCard to access to that facility as normal.