JANUARY, 2005

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Personal Call Policy

This is a reminder of the policy regarding personal use of college telephones by faculty and staff. This policy was established in 1992. 

Telephones are provided by the campus and the State of New York for professional use in order to accomplish our work.  As such, inappropriate and unreasonable usage of the telephone for personal business is discouraged. 

The full text of the College's Personal Call Policy is available at http://www.oneonta.edu/admin/telecomm/personal_use_phone.asp.

What Our Staff Is Up To

Walter Romero and his student workers in the Administrative Desktop Support Office are in the process of rolling out nearly one hundred computers to replace older machines.  These machines will be set up in Secure Desktop mode, which has been a very successful means of keeping computers up-to-date with necessary software patches and antivirus definitions. 

Naturally, distributing a hundred machines means that all data must be transferred from users' old machines to the new ones.  Once machines have been replaced, Walter's office will then have brought in a hundred older computers available to replace even older machines that are out there on campus.  The second round is similar to the first, finishing with yet another hundred computers that are pretty much totally obsolete and ready for surplussing.  

This project will likely consume the better part of the spring semester and will be completed with the assistance of three student employees.

Firewall Implementation

The Network Administrator and Information Security Administrator have successfully installed a firewall on the campus network core.  A firewall is a device that is used to control the flow of network traffic across the campus and between the campus and the rest of the world.

The new firewall's primary purpose is to prevent attacks by automated agents or by active hackers, and to limit the damaging effects of machines whose security has been compromised by viruses or worms.   Over the spring semester one segment of the campus network after another will be moved behind the firewall and secured.  Users will see no effects of this work, with the possible exception of a more smoothly operating network!

CGP gets more bandwidth

The Oneonta campus enjoys a tremendous amount of bandwidth to the internet. We have more connection capacity than nearly any other SUNY campus, with 45 Megabits per second.  The Cooperstown Graduate Program, however, has been limping along with a much, much smaller connection.  This is primarily due to their location on the west side of Otsego Lake at the Cooperstown Graduate Program / Biological Field Station Building.  Recently, however, the CGP has obtained a Business-class Road Runner connection that provides them with 3 Megabits of incoming network capacity and 768 kilobits of outgoing capacity.  This is a tremendous improvement over their previous connection.  It will also permit the CGP to take advantage of connections to campus resources that they did not have access to before.

IT Orientation for new employees (or for those who become disoriented)

New employees at the Oneonta campus are often overwhelmed by the vast amount of new information that they need to learn.  A fair proportion of this involves Information Technology Services, which includes telephone service, email, Banner, websites and data security.  There are also a host of College Information Policies that new employees need to be aware of, and many resources that the employee can call on if they need help.  A document is available at http://www.oneonta.edu/technology/orientation to help them organize institutional knowledge about Information Technology Services.  This is a good source of information that will be of great value to the new employee and may even be useful even to some of the old hands on campus.  

Changes at Computer Services

In December of 2004 Tracy Olmstead took a lateral transfer within the Department of Computer and Telecommunications Services and joined the Web Development Office in Computer Services.  She is responsible for assisting Phil Bidwell with clerical tasks related to the College Website as well as other projects in Web Development.  Welcome, Tracy!

If you have a question for Computer and Telecommunication Services about:

Computer Problems or Related Issues - Call the Information Technology Help Desk at     436-4567

Telephone Service or Problems - Call the Office of Telecommunications at 436-2577

Directory Assistance - call 436-3500

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