CIS News: Changes in Service

Students: Another chance to get your PAW Prints card

Each academic year, students are offered a PAW Prints card that allows them to print for free up to a cost quota. This year the quota is $30. If you did not get your PAW Prints card in the Fall, then you are eligible to receive it now for the spring semester. You can pick up your card at the CIT distribution window during the office hours: Mon – Fri, 11am - 5pm. The cards are available for pickup until Wed 2/28 . You will need to bring your BrownID in order to receive your PAW Prints card.

Wireless Expansion Project Status

Last summer CIS embarked on a large-scale project to expand wireless networking service to campus areas including dormitories, classrooms, outdoor areas, and other locations. To date, 34 of the 48 dormitories have wireless coverage reaching all student rooms and common areas in those buildings. However, this coverage has come at a higher cost than anticipated due to both technology and construction issues. The project is taking some time out to assess the situation and re-plan the remainder of the work. Further information about the wireless project will be forthcoming in the near future.

Decommissioning of news.brown.edu

On Feb 28, 2007, CIS will be decommissioning the newsgroup service which is currently running at news.brown.edu. The specific groups that were hosted here at Brown for our own community, such as brown.bboard.forsale, will come to an end. The news.brown.edu server has also been used to provide access to newsgroups outside of Brown – so in order to read outside newsgroups after Feb 28, users will need to make sure they are no longer going through news.brown.edu.
Newsreaders are not supported by the Help Desk, but we do have a document to assist users who need to switch to an alternative newsgroup source: https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/CISDOC/Newsgroups

IPTV Expands

Beginning Jan 19th 2007, IPTV (a way of watching TV on your computer) will carry a total of 32 channels - more channels than any other service on campus. To watch TV from your computer in the dorms, visit http://www.brown.edu/cis/tv/ and click "Watch TV".

Faculty and Staff email quotas doubling

As of today, all faculty and staff mailboxes on the Campus Exchange server will have email quotas of 200 MB. Please contact the Brown Helpdesk if you have any questions about the quota increase. Thank you!

warning message: 185 MB
unable to send new messages: 200 MB
unable to send and receive messages: 220 MB

Canned Spam

CIS is changing the way that it manages spam. As of February 14th, 2005, spam sent to you will be quarantined and instead you will receive a daily digest that lists the messages held in quarantine for you.

Previously, spam was 'tagged' by an anti-spam program but still delivered to your inbox. The new anti-spam system that CIS has purchased, called Proofpoint, not only tags spam, it also quarantines it so no longer clogs up your inbox. You are sent a spam quarantine digest each day that allows you to browse the list quickly to check if there are any email messages that were tagged as spam that shouldn't have been. Should this occur, you can release the email from the quarantine and it will be delivered to your inbox. However, CIS testing has shown that mis-tagging is rare, as is spam that eludes Proofpoint's defenses. More information about this service is available at: Spam Control

New/Transfer Students Pick up PAW Prints Cards at CIT; New Color Print Prices

New/transfer students and those who have not already picked up their PAW Prints free print card may do so at the Dispatch window in the lobby of the CIT building (next to the Help Desk). The card is worth $25 of free black & white printing to any PAW Prints printer for the 2004-2005 academic year (not applicable towards color printing). Students who received a PAW Prints card last semester are not eligible for another card.

Charges for color printing to PAW Print color printers will be reduced for the second semester. New prices are $0.65 per page, single-sided and $1.00 per page, double-sided. Color printers are located in the Rock and Science Libraries.

PAW Prints Color Printing Debuts Nov 15

PAW Prints expands its services on November 15 to include color printing from any networked connection across campus (including wireless). Color printers will be located in the Rockefeller Library (2nd floor copy room) and Sciences Library (Level A). All pages sent to these printers, whether color or black & white, will be charged at $.90/simplex; $1.60/duplex. Note that the PAW Prints Free Print card cannot be used to pay for color printing.

This new service is managed by Graphic Services. Any questions or refunds should be directed to the staff at Graphic Services. More information about using the PAW Prints service is available on the Printing@Brown website.

News from the Office of Telecommunications

The Telecommunications Office reminds its customers that with the office's recent move to Davol Square, mobile communication devices such as wireless phones and pagers may now be picked up at the CIT Help Desk (CIT 101) during normal business hours (please bring your Brown ID). Emergency replacements can be arranged by calling 3-2007. The move has not affected Telecommunications' telephone numbers or e-mail addresses, though the campus PO box number reverts back to the original box 1885.

In other news:

• A new policy related to departmental telephone services was reviewed this summer and approved by the Computing Advisory Board (CAB). The Telephone Services Policy is posted on the CIS policy page.
• The agreement between Brown & AT&T Wireless has been renewed, offering incentives to upgrade your cellular service to AT&T Wireless GSM Service. There is also a new pooled plan available to users of Brown-issued phones: 300 "National Pooled Minutes" (no roaming or Long Distance charges continental US), unlimited "Mobile to Mobile" and free "Nights & Weekends". [Wireless Options]
• Department managers should note that the rates for international calling within departments were reduced an additional 20% over the summer. This would have first appeared in the August financial ledgers as an adjustment to July’s international calling charges (making the reduction retroactive to July 1). Any questions may be directed to the Telecom Financial Administrator at 3-1717. [Understanding Your Bill]

Visit the Telecommunications website or call 3-2007 to learn more about the above and Telecom's other services.

New OWA with Exchange services upgrade

CIS is in the process of upgrading various components of the Campus Exchange infrastructure. While these changes will not require any reconfiguration of your email client, it will mean that if you use OWA you'll notice a significantly different look and many performance and feature enhancements after the upgrade has been completed.

Some of the new features include:

• Spell-check (requires Internet Explorer on Windows)
• Ability to add a signature to your outbound mail
• Junk mail filtering
• Blocking of embedded external HTML content
• Customization of the OWA interface

The upgrade itself occurs in two stages.

• The first stage was an upgrade of the OWA, POP and IMAP servers to the new version of Exchange. As a result, OWA icons are slightly different as isl the logoff page. (This upgrade took place on August 5.)
• Stage two involves upgrading the Exchange servers that host the mailboxes. The full OWA 2003 client will be available after upgrading the mailbox servers.

The mailbox servers for students will be upgraded first on Sunday, August 15, between 4:00 a.m. and noon. The following weekend, the servers for faculty and staff will be worked on between 8:00 a.m. and noon on Saturday, August 21. There will be intermittent email connectivity during the scheduled hours, with each upgrade incurring several short outages, generally only 5 to 10 minutes in length.

Note that all email messages and folders will be retained during the upgrade.

There are some final upgrade steps that may occur the first time you log on to your (upgraded) Exchange mailbox:

• If you use an IMAP client (like Outlook Express or Eudora in IMAP mode), you may notice that your client "hangs" for several minutes during the first logon to your upgraded mailbox. In the background, Exchange is upgrading the IMAP content of your mailbox and this delay will only happen once. Be patient and do not abort this process since you will simply have to wait through it later.
• If you use Outlook in Native/MAPI mode, Outlook Express or Eudora in POP mode, you won't experience any delay and you may not even notice that the upgrade has occurred.
• The OWA client is brand new and if you use OWA as your primary mail client, you will not experience a delay when you connect to your mailbox the first time.
• Messages that have been purged from your Deleted Items folder (this is where messages go when you "Empty Deleted Items") are not upgraded and your Deleted Message Recovery Area will be built from scratch after the upgrade. Please Note: messages in your Deleted Items folder are considered part of your proper mailbox and these messages will be upgraded with the rest of your mailbox folders.

Shut off of clear-text FTP for webpub web server

CIS will be turning off clear-text FTP on the webpub web server on August 18. Webpublishers who have not switched to a more secure FTP client will need to change how they connect to the web server by that date.

If you are using WS-FTP, Fetch or a version of Dreamweaver that is older than MX 2004, you are using clear-text FTP. Alternative software and instructions, and the reasons for this change, can be found at Web Pub Central.

Your own Virtual Private Network

On February 25, a new service was introduced that expands access to Brown electronic resources. Virtual Private Network, or VPN, allows convenient and secure logon to Brown's network even at a remote location. Once the VPN client is installed and configured, you will be able to:

• Browse campus-limited web resources
• Access services such as keyed software that had been limited to campus-based users
• Send email through Brown's mail-relay services
• Use Outlook in MAPI mode (limited to those who have converted to Exchange)

The following operating systems can use VPN services: all supported Windows OS, Mac OS 10.x, and Linux (which is available but not supported by CIS).

To download a Windows or Mac copy of the client, go to the Software download page. To learn to use Brown's VPN service, visit the "Remote Access @ Brown" section of CIS's documentation page. A VPN FAQ is also available that addresses common technical support questions. Issues and questions regarding the operation of the service should be addressed to the Help Desk (Help@brown.edu), which now provides full support for VPN services.

New for Semester 2

• CIS has enhanced the security services in the Residence Halls in an effort to improve their network reliability. The new security scanning should have no impact on returning dorm users if their anti-virus software and operating systems are up-to-date and kept current. Computers that do not have the most recent security updates, however, may need to reactivate a connection to campus through the myConnection service. This could include installing automatic updates as part of this process. As this can be time-consuming, CIS recommends that this be done as early as possible, before schedules get hectic.
  » For assistance with setting automatic system updates, see: www.brown.edu/cis/doc/autoupdate.html.
  » To install anti-virus scanning software, with automatic update features, see: software.brown.edu/dist/type-antivirus.html

• As part of security improvements, SMTP from the dorms has been blocked. This change will prevent incidents of compromised dorm machines from clogging the Brown network with heavy loads of spam. Those running SMTP servers will need to route them through mail-relay.brown.edu. For help with this, please contact the Help Desk.
  

• Printer release stations are being introduced in the public computing clusters. CIS has introduced these stations in an effort to reduce paper and toner expenses related to unclaimed print jobs. The public printer queues have seen a continuing increase in usage over the last few years, with a great deal of waste. The addition of the print release stations, beginning with the CIT then later in the other clusters, is the first step in a move toward a print quota system. Other universities who have introduced such stations have reported almost immediate decreases in printer output of around 25%. More details about this service change and how to use the stations can be found in the cluster printing FAQ.

Changes slated for cluster printing services

The advent of the computer age brought predictions of a paperless society. Books, phone directories, and all manner of information was to go online, so who would need paper and ink anymore?

Obviously, a lot of us still do. Reams of paper and boxes of toner are transformed into huge stacks of printouts. These are all the more noticeable in public computing areas such as Brown's clusters. Online availability of information has not lessened the need for hard copy. In fact, Brown's public printer queues have experienced a continuing increase in usage over the last few years.

As the amount of printing has grown, so to has the amount of unretrieved output, creating mounds of wasted paper. A new initiative by CIS will work toward reducing paper waste in clusters and heightening users' awareness of bad printing habits.

Starting in the spring semester, print release stations will be introduced into the clusters. Before output can be printed, the person requesting it will need to manually release the print job(s) at the stations situated next to the printers. This entails locating the job(s) in the queue and entering a user-set password (tied to the job). Unreleased jobs will sit in the queue and are eventually deleted. Other universities who have introduced such stations have reported almost immediate decreases in printer output of around 25%.

The print release stations are the first step in a move toward a print quota system, which would limit the number of free pages that can be printed, with a charge per page beyond that quota (to be determined). This change should further deter unnecessary printing (other schools experience a 50 to 60% drop in volume) and may be used to help recover increasing supplies and maintenance costs.

Users are also being encouraged to develop good printing habits that could save resources and time lost by sorting through needless print jobs. Printing tips are available on the CIS Documentation pages.

Wireless users: new Subscriber Service ID

Beginning 11/24, all campus wireless users will see a single SSID (Subscriber Service ID). The new SSID is "Brown". This change simplifies client configuration settings for users who had been unable to specify a 'default' or 'any' SSID in their profile. Those users can now setup a Brown profile that will connect anywhere wireless coverage is available. For all other users, this change should be transparent. <more about wireless at Brown>

Students now eligible for upgraded mail services

CIS is currently at work on a significant upgrade to Brown’s email services, which will mean a much improved web-based client, vacation messaging, an on-line calendar, and better protection against possible hardware problems, made possible by the introduction of new Microsoft Exchange 2000 servers.