UIT start of school preparations

To ensure a smooth start to Fall Semester, UIT staff have been busy fulfilling IT infrastructure needs, expanding campus wireless coverage, and testing load capacity for critical campus services, among other things.

"For last few years, we’ve been building a cohort of key players on start of school systems," Mike Ekstrom, director of Common Infrastructure Services (CIS) and Unified Communications (UC), said at the IT Professionals Forum on August 3, 2016. "Our goal is to ensure ahead of school that we're ready as an organization."

IT helpers

UIT staff made themselves available to answer walk-in IT service questions from students and instructors returning to campus. IT helpers were dispatched to the Peterson Heritage Center, Marriott Library, Olpin Union, Campus Store and Lassonde Studios in the week preceding the new semester, as well as the first couple days of classes. They fielded help topics such as connecting to UConnect, logging into CIS, downloading free Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office software, customizing a UMail address, and more.

Although members of UIT did not staff a booth during this year's Housing & Residential Education (HRE) Move-in Days, John Wardle, product manager in Unified Communications (UC), said that UC/UTV student staff did maintain a presence on campus to assist new students.

Meeting infrastructure needs

UIT staff and contractors also had their hands full fulfilling IT infrastructure needs on several major construction projects – on and off campus. Two high-profile grand openings this fall are the Farmington Health Center, University Health Care’s satellite hospital, and Lassonde Studios, which was prominently featured in a recent New York Times article.

"For us to even find people who can install fiber and copper and keep up with all of these projects simultaneously is a real challenge,” Ekstrom said, noting that Lassonde alone contains 36 miles of cable and 1,087 ports.

Wireless coverage

In an effort to create a wireless strategy and identify "under-served" areas of the University, UIT contracted with a consultant to conduct a physical wireless survey of over 200 buildings on campus. Since the survey was completed, Trevor Long, Associate Director of Network and Core in CIS, and his group have been laying the spatial data out in a meaningful way on a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) map.

Mike Ekstrom, Dir. of Common Infrastructure Services and Unified Communications

In addition, to alleviate some of the burden of thousands of new devices connecting to the campus network, 16,000 IP addresses were added to UConnect, and UGuest was moved to private IP address space.

"It's amazing how every year it’s not just a teeny jump of new wireless devices, it's always a huge jump and we never know exactly how big it will be," Ekstrom said.

The UGuest WiFi network onboarding process has also been simplified by removing the SMS condition. Visitors are no longer required to receive a text message prior to connecting. In addition, a captive browser now automatically pops up and redirects users to the sign-in portal rather than requiring them to manually launch a browser.

"It's really important for us to make the onboarding of devices easy while being mindful of security requirements," Ekstrom said.

Cell coverage has also been boosted in and around Rice-Eccles Stadium. For AT&T customers, that includes 12 new antennas and a cellular tower on wheels. T-Mobile and Verizon also deployed additional antennas.

Communication changes

Coinciding with the start of semester, UIT's Service Status page now features a new look and enhanced features.

In addition to the newly operational webpage, which you can opt into for email notifications and follow its companion Twitter feed @UofUITStatus, campus users have several ways to stay informed on outage notifications. Follow UIT's @UofUIT Twitter feed, or subscribe to our news and information email service or NotifyIT (which features SMS and email options).

"UIT wants you to know what’s going on in our environment," Ekstrom said.

With uofu.status.io, there are also options of receiving updates via RSS feed, Webhook, or an iCalendar link, which connects to an individual's Microsoft Outlook calendar.

Kim Tanner, Associate  Dir. of Platform Services

Load balancing and testing

UIT recently replaced the entire load balancing infrastructure for critical campus services in order to increase the capacity and reliability of applications. In addition, UIT conducted a series of load tests on the University’s Central Authentication Service (CAS) to optimize system performance and capacity. Load testing involves putting demand and measuring response to determine a software system's behavior under normal and projected peak load conditions.

"A lot of work went on behind the scenes to do that load testing and it worked out really well,” said Kim Tanner, CIS Associate Director of Platform Services.

Change moratorium

Ekstrom said that 90 percent of campus and clinical outages are the result of some change in an environment, which is impetus for putting a moratorium on changes in place from Wednesday, August 10 to Monday, August 29, 2016.

"A moratorium doesn't mean changes will be discarded without consideration," Ekstrom said. "It means that changes go through an additional level of vetting ... to evaluate whether that change has value to the broader business versus the risk of what it could do to the broader organization. We are very committed to try and prevent those unanticipated consequences."

 

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