IT Trends at Notre Dame

10/6/2004

By Mary Brandel

E-mail and Internet use have become a way of life for students, faculty and staff at Notre Dame, who received an average of 3.5 million messages per month in the last school year.

Ensuring that all this technology runs smoothly requires a lot of behind-the-scenes work; including Internet upgrades, spam filtering and virus detection. To that end, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) has widened the pipes that connect the University to the Internet and has beefed up network security.

On the commodity Internet connection (Internet1), the OIT increased bandwidth by 30%, from 70 megabits per second (Mbs) to 100Mbs. This increase will easily accommodate the rate of inbound traffic created by UND users, which averages 65 megabits per second (Mbs) and peaks at 100Mbs, as well as outbound traffic, which averages 45Mbs.

"The main thing users notice is increased performance due to the lack of congestion," says Tom Klimek, network engineering manager in the OIT. "Downloads are quicker, Web pages flash up faster, and multimedia streams are quicker."

Users of the research-oriented Internet connection (Internet2) can also see performance improvements, with bandwidth increases of 80%. This increases bandwidth on Internet2 from 20Mbs to 100Mbs, which will accommodate Internet2's average 10Mbs of inbound and outbound traffic, as well as its peak of 40Mbs.

"This may open avenues to new types of research that users weren't able to do because the bandwidth wasn't there before," Klimek says.

Meanwhile, students, faculty and staff who work and study in DeBartolo Hall will benefit from the 100,000 feet of new Category 6 and fiber-optic cabling that was installed. "It's a very up-to-date cable plan capable of gigabit speeds and beyond," Klimek says. Other locations were upgraded with a new switching infrastructure that takes these locations from 10Mbs switches to 10/100Mbs and in some instances to gigabit speeds. These include Fitzpatrick, Cushing and Mendoza College of Business.

Avoiding viruses

Still, being connected to the Internet has its hazards, among them viruses traveling as email attachments and the bothersome, and sometimes dangerous, stream of spam. OIT central e-mail servers are on the case, having rejected four million out of 10 million messages in the past year.

"A message might be rejected because the source or sender is blacklisted, because the recipient address is invalid, or for technical or policy reasons," explains Paul Russell, senior systems administrator of messaging. "While some rejects may have been legitimate messages, the majority would have been spam or viruses," Russell says.

Each month, OIT virus detection servers find an average of 165,000 viruses in incoming e-mail, although that number can climb even higher. In August 2003, the Sobig.f virus was detected, and "by the end of the month -- 12 days later -- our servers had detected approximately 700,000 copies of the virus," Russell says.

Another measure to protect e-mail users is the renaming of suspicious-looking attachments. All too often, c ommon e-mail attachments, such as Microsoft Word (.doc) documents or even compressed files (.zip), carry viruses. As these messages pass through the central e-mail servers to campus recipients, suspicious attachments are automatically changed -"article.doc" becomes "article.doc.unknown," for example--to alert the recipient to the possibility that the file may contain malicious code.

The average number of attached files that get this treatment is 6,500 per month; however, the number can grow from 2,000 in some months to 12,000 in others.

Taking charge

Incoming students this year enjoyed extra virus protection from the very moment they plugged their computers onto the network. As part of an effort to make the entire campus more secure, the OIT created the TakeCharge utility, which students were instructed to install before using campus Internet connections.

The TakeCharge utility checks to see which version of Windows the PC is running, and if it's XP, it will activate the firewall built into the XP operating system. For any other Windows version, it activates the "automatic updates" option, which enables critical patches to be automatically downloaded and installed. The utility also gives students the option to install antivirus software and anti-spyware utilities. "TakeCharge is an easy way to give students a secure computer in one step," says Kathryn Christman, OIT Help Desk manager.

The utility resulted in 60% fewer calls from last year's back-to-school period, when the Help Desk was deluged with calls from students infected with the Blaster virus. "They were getting infected as soon as they plugged into the network," says Christman. "The Help Desk was completely over-burdened with helping students get on the network and trying to clean their machines on time."

Diminished security-related calls will result in faster service times for students calling the Help Desk. "Security calls have been the number one thing the Help Desk deals with, and they take much longer than other calls," Christman explains.

Looking ahead

In preparation for the future, the OIT is also creating more wireless access points for the many students who arrive on campus with laptop computers. In the past year, the department has added wireless services to 25 campus buildings, increasing the number of wireless access points by 30% for a total of 325. It plans to add 75 more wireless access points in the next four months. "Ninety-five percent to 98% of students at Notre Dame are bringing laptops, and most all of them include wireless capabilities," Klimek says. "More and more of the campus is being outfitted with wireless access points to accommodate them."

Faculty members are now buying into wireless, as well. Between 2003 and 2004, the number of faculty using wireless increased by 25.5%. Staff use of wireless stayed flat in that same time period.

Meanwhile, a greater number of students this year arrived on campus with Windows than Macintosh computers, although Mac users increased by a greater percent (35.8%) than Windows users (10.4%). A total of 8,590 students use Windows, while just 759 use a Macintosh.

Nearly 1,450 faculty members use Windows computers vs. 565 who use Macintosh machines. Similar to the students, faculty Mac users increased by a greater percent (25.4%) than Windows users (14.6%). Only among staff is Windows growing more quickly as a platform, with an 18.2% increase over last year vs. a 9.8% increase for the Mac. There are 4,681 staffers who are Windows users vs. 883 who use the Mac.