The latest news from the Office of Information Technology
An Open House will be held in Rooms 210 and 226 of the Multi-Purpose Science & Technology Building on Wednesday, March 26, from 12:00 noon to 2:00p.m. This event is being co-sponsored by NACS and Gateway Computers and will highlight the NACS MST computer lab.
Free food and beverages will be available at this event.
The UCInet Mobile Access service is an extension of the campus network which supports wired and wireless portable computer network connections in numerous locations across the campus.
Around campus, particularly in classrooms and computer labs, open network jacks are managed through UCInet Mobile Access. Using the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), network addresses are issued dynamically (on request). UCI campus users are required to register the networking device they will use before connecting to UCInet at a wired Mobile Access connection point as well as in any campus wireless access zone.
UCInet Mobile Access uses an authentication scheme based on Media Access Control (MAC) addresses. A MAC address is the hardware address of the Network Interface Card (NIC) of your computer. You need to have this number while registering for the UCInet Mobile Access network and campus-wide DHCP services. Help is available online.
NACS is currently focusing on common areas where people are likely to use wireless. New coverage areas are being added on a regular basis. NACS wants to know where you would use wireless networking.
UCInet’s wireless mobile access service uses the IEEE 802.11b (”Wi-Fi”) wireless networking standard and supports connections from network cards conforming to that standard. This is a shared network technology. Like all shared networks, these networks should be presumed insecure. The Virtual Private Network (VPN) may be used to create a secure connection from UCInet Mobile Access.
NACS provides other services to help our clients with their wireless network needs. These include: free consulting, needs assessment, site survey, design, cost estimation, installation, and maintenance, and opportunities for cost sharing of equipment.
For more information, please contact NACS at nacs@uci.edu.
For information on UCInet Mobile Access
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ucinet/mobile/
For the latest in wireless coverage
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ucinet/mobile/locations.html
For email updates on wireless coverage
https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/ucinet-wireless
For help registering your wireless network card
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ucinet/mobile/registration.html
For more information on the VPN
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/security/vpn.html
For free assistance with your local wireless equipment
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ucinet/mobile/consultation.html
The NACS Response Center is your one-stop gateway to all NACS information and services. The Response Center is available 24/7 for urgent technical support problems by telephone (x42222). Greater expertise is on hand during normal business hours (8 AM to 5 PM, Monday through Friday). During normal business hours, the Response Center also answers e-mail questions (nacs@uci.edu) and handles drop-in requests (E2130 Engineering Gateway).
Software, media, and other physical resources that NACS distributes are also available at the Response Center, and the staff there can direct you to any other NACS staff member or service.
Getting information about network, telephone, or computing outages to the campus has become a little easier. NACS has a status page to inform you when there are campus wide problems. This page is updated by the NACS Response Center when problems are reported. The status page gives a brief description of the problem and the resolution.
If you are having a network, telephone, or computing problem and want to know if it is a campus wide issue, visithttp://www.nacs.uci.edu/status/ If the problem is not listed, call the Response Center to report the problem and get assistance.
The Network & Telecommunications Operations and Network & Support Programming groups within NACS moved to a new home at the intersection of Bison and California Avenues in the University Research Park in November of 2002.
Network & Telecommunications Operations maintains and supports the UCI campus telephone, voice mail, 800MHz trunked radio, and UCInet network service systems.
Network & Support Programming manages a range of central IT services including the Domain Name Service (DNS), printed and electronic directories (PH and LDAP), the campus email routers (MTAs), and the UCInetID authentication system.
Our telephone numbers, fax number, and email addresses remain the same. Our new address is 5201 California Avenue, Suite 150, Irvine, CA 92697-5475.
How big is your US Mail mailbox at home? What would happen if you read your mail, but returned it to your mailbox? It would get increasingly stuffed and tax the ingenuity of your mail carrier until one day there would be no way to bring you your mail. If you got a bigger mailbox, you would only delay the problem.
Electronic mail suffers from the same limitations. There is only so much disk space allocated to your inbox, and a message that won’t fit will be returned to sender. So, unless you delete or choose some other place to store mail you’ve read (”refiling”), first large messages and then even small messages can’t be delivered to you.
Even with the best management, some faculty receive large attachments, and only a few of them are sufficient to strain email capacity. NACS is piloting a Web-based file sharing system that will provide a means of collaborating on large files superior to using attachments.
Instructions for using several popular mail reading programs can be found at http://www.e4e.uci.edu/email/handouts.html You can check your disk space usage and limits at http://www.e4e.uci.edu/cgi-bin/check_quota.cgi
If you have a web-enabled wireless device, you can access some of NACS’s services while mobile.
Many devices such as cell phones and PDAs (e.g. Palm Pilot or PocketPC) advertise a “wireless web” feature. Such devices contain a web browser that understands web content which is written in WML (Wireless Markup Language). As these devices typically have much slower data speeds and less memory than a standard PC, WML content is tuned to their small screens and limited data speeds.
With NACS’s WML home page, you can search for someone’s phone number in UCI’s phone directory, read email with Webmail or check your CorporateTime calendar, all from your cell phone. (”Wireless web” features often come with a supplemental service fee. Contact your service provider for information on fees and access coverage.)
To take advantage of these NACS services, point your web-enabled device to: http://www.nacs.uci.edu/wml/