Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

Those of you who read the student blog Wesleying (I often read it myself) may have seen a recent post titled “Open Letter to ITS Management”, where Sam DeFabbia-Kane ‘11 discusses various points relating to ITS communications as well as issues surrounding network connection speed. I have tried to address several of the points raised in this post below.

Communication

First off, I am surprised to see that an ITS student employee feels that the Wesleying blog is the best way to communicate with ITS management. It sure is one way to communicate, because I am responding to it here!!! However, there are more efficient and more productive ways to communicate with us. If you work for ITS, you can always talk to your supervisors first and elevate it up to me if the problem warrants that. Anyone else should feel free to send an email to its@wesleyan.edu (Karen Warren, the Director of User and Technical Services and I read and respond to these emails) or directly to me at ravishan@wesleyan.edu or call me at (860) 685-2104.

Also, I have been talking to the ITS staff who manage our students to find ways to bridge the gap between student employees and staff. I strongly encourage student employees to get to know ITS staff and feel free to talk to them when there are service issues.

ITS tries extremely hard to communicate using the traditional tools such as telephones, e-mail, and system status messages on the ITS home page, Electronic Portfolio Login Page, and WebMail login page, etc. And we try to communicate system outages and other issues in a timely fashion and using language that is not overly technical. We also try to get in touch with students, especially in the woodframe houses, about network connectivity there and how best to improve it.

We have also begun to work with the WSA/ITS Advisory Committee on major technology initiatives that  are likely to affect our students. Jolee West, Director of Academic Computing Services at ITS, is the Co-Chair of this committee. I am very encouraged by the types of conversations we have had so far, and we will work with them more as we move forward and look to them for advice on how to improve our communications with students.

I welcome any suggestions on how to improve communications with the students, especially the student employees.

Network Connectivity

Maintaining reliable network connectivity is extremely important to us, and the constant appetite for increased bandwidth presents a perennial challenge. We keep an eye on the changing landscape and make adjustments as necessary. Here are some basic facts:

• Students are increasingly relying on wireless to access the network. Interference between adjacent wireless access point presents a technical limitation to the amount of access points we can deploy around campus.

• The wireless technology is a shared bandwidth technology.  As more computers attach to a single access point, less bandwidth is available to each of the connected computers.

• Though we have deployed  over 300 wireless access points around campus, we sometimes see 16 to 20 computers attaching themselves to a single access point. When we see things like this, we try to add more access points within the technical limitations to alleviate the congestion.

• The University increased its Internet bandwidth from 70 Mb last year to 100 Mb this year. Bandwidth is like disk space – the moment you procure more, it gets filled up. One can argue that this is not enough bandwidth. Bandwidth is very expensive, and our bandwidth is comparable to many of our peer institutions. We are asking the administrators of our ISP, the Connecticut Education Network, to reallocate unused bandwidth from K-12 schools and libraries to Higher Ed institutions for a reduced price in the evenings, but due to logistical difficulties in doing this, this discussion is stalled.

• We do “shape” the bandwidth. The primary goal of shaping is to make sure that there is enough bandwidth reserved for the core mission of the University. The shaping is a complicated business, and we do this very carefully in consultation with the vendor whose product we use. We constantly read about what our peer institutions are doing to make sure we are in line with industry standards. One of the things we do is allocate a lot more bandwidth to the student network on campus between 6 PM and 7 AM (because most faculty and staff are not using the network during these times).

• When we hear about problems or receive alarms from a wide variety of system wide monitoring tools, we look at them and make adjustments as needed. As much as possible, we try to schedule any potentially disruptive maintenance for off peak times and inform users of any issues.

• The network connectivity in woodframe houses pose a completely different set of challenges and we are working to address these issues as well. The fact that these houses are on Comcast (or soon on AT&T) network complicates things even more.

In the spirit of what I said above, recently we have heard reports of wireless issues in certain locations, and we are attending to them as soon as possible. Also, we have heard that in the evenings, some students have not been able to connect to iTunes Store. We have looked into this problem and consulted our usual sources to see how our peers are dealing with this issue and put in a different configuration last week. This change, in simple terms, allocates available bandwidth more evenly to all the students who are connecting to the network, rather than a select few getting a lot more bandwidth than the others. This also seems to have improved the iTunesU issue.

Of course, the leveling of the playing field that this new configuration has introduced is likely to affect the experience of the few that were getting a much larger bandwidth share before, but overall, this seems to have had the beneficial effect. I have asked my staff to communicate these types of changes in the future through the normal communication channels as much as possible and as early as possible.

Since the available bandwidth is already so tight, we need to pick and choose how best to allocate the bandwidth. This requires us to look for pattern changes and adjust the shaping accordingly. For various reasons, I cannot go into specifics on what these are.

The Last Thing

Sam correctly points out that the statement “For example, running a program which allows illegal sharing of copyrighted music or video is prohibited.” in our computer usage policy needs to be rewritten. It is a very valid suggestion and we will revise the sentence soon.