The Hub: Published By, For and About ITS

The Hub is rapidly approaching its first anniversary! We have one more issue planned in 2005 (send us your tips and submissions by 5 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 7, please) and then will take a break for the holidays.

With a year’s experience as a team, the staff of The Hub are ready to re-tool the publication to make it even better, and we want readers’ input! We plan to host a roundtable discussion either the week of Dec. 12 or the week of Jan. 9. To participate, please send an e-mail to its_communications@unc.edu and let us know which week suits you better. We’ll work with participants to schedule a convenient time and place. Thanks.

ITS’s annual tradition of a chili cook-off to raise money for the State Employees’ Combined Campaign (SECC) was successful again this year, with eager diners raising $700 in donations and chili votes.

There’s friendly competition among chili cooks for bragging rights each year, in both vegetarian and chili-with-meat categories. Alice Brower, Enterprise Applications, took first place in the vegetarian category with her Healthy Vegetarian Chili. Steve Cornelison in the Office of the CIO was the runner-up with Java Bean Chili. The chili-with-meat chefs were Computing Policy’s Doug Brown, whose concoction was called Cajun Chili Folle à Viande, and Tim Coynesmith of Academic Computing, who contributed Cowboy Chili. Doug Brown’s Cajun Chili was the best in show.

The online campus directory that has been available to ITS for the last week will be unveiled to campus at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 30, pending approval of the steering advisor committee. ITS staff members were instrumental in performing final real-world testing of the program.

“The project team has closely monitored the testing process, addressed all of the bugs, and made minor modifications to the search results. The new directory is stable, information is processed as expected and the Registrar’s issues and concerns have been addressed,” reported Jan Tax of Enterprise Applications (EA). “The directory team is ready to go and very happy to be finishing this project,” he said. Tax co-managed the project with Kim Skeen and Candy Davies.

Other members of the project team, past and present, include George Bowie, Paul Briest, Paul Cappannari, Tonya Holeman, Jeff Spencer, Simon Spero, Richard Thoma and Scott Williams.–LJB

ITS has successfully negotiated to bring campus a centralized solution for desktop and laptop backups.

Iron Mountain, Inc., offers a managed backup service that will securely and automatically back up the data on a subscriber’s Microsoft Windows desktop or laptop system. The cost is only $9 a month, and the campus-wide rollout is Thursday, Dec. 1.

Judd Knott, AVC for IT Infrastructure and Operations, noted that the Iron Mountain solution has been extensively tested by ITS and has been in use at the School of Public Health for over a year. “This solution is easy to use and has a high degree of user satisfaction,” he reported. “It just works!

“It’s a great service,” Knott continued. “I use it myself and am confident that I am protected. At $9 per month the rates are very good, and this is a great tool to help protect your people.”

Bruce Egan, associate director of the ITS Response Center, added, “Data backup is one of our last Achilles’ heels at the Help Desk. If someone comes in with a bad hard drive, there just aren’t a lot of tools we have that can help.”

While Egan and his staff constantly urge users to back up their own information, CDs, memory keys and iPods all require the user to be proactive in saving files. The Iron Mountain service, by contrast, runs unattended in the background once it is set up.

Egan is also impressed that data storage is Iron Mountain’s main business, not a sideline, and that the university already has a relationship with the company through tape backup services.

Among the features of the program is that it backs up only the data unique to each user. It will save all of someone’s Word documents, for example, but not the whole Word program. This allows the company to minimize the amount of storage space required for each user. Should a subscriber request a download of files, however, the program will automatically supply the Word software as well.

The program compresses and encrypts data before sending it. This improves security and provides faster service. Even a business traveler in a hotel room with dialup connection can retrieve files quickly. And this can be done from a central Web site; users need not be on campus or even in North Carolina or the U.S. to access their material. If someone’s laptop is stolen, for example, he can log in on a borrowed computer and retrieve files needed for a presentation.

Egan noted that the program is limited to Windows-based machines, and that it is intended as only a first step in addressing campuswide backup options. “It can’t handle petabytes of research data,” Egan said, “but it can help people protect themselves.”

If the program is used successfully by employees, Egan hopes to offer it (for a fee) to next year’s freshman class through the Carolina Computing Initiative.

To sign up, look for an announcement pointing the way to a Web site with more details.–LJB

Members of the Processing Services group of Infrastructure and Operations were recognized today (Nov. 29) as recipients of the ITS Exemplar Award for August. The delay was due to Judd Knott’s desire to recognize them publicly and his lack of a suitable venue until now. Knott, the assistant vice chancellor for I&O, made the most of the SECC Chili Cook-off, standing on a chair to announce his pride in the staff who remained in ITS Franklin throughout its renovation.

Ray DeCristofaro, director for operations, processing services, whose nomination of the team follows, accepted the award plaque on their behalf. Each member of the team will receive a $25 gift card to a local store.

DeCristofaro wrote:

Please consider the ITS Franklin Operations staff for the ITS Awards program. This staff has worked under particularly trying and difficult circumstances during the renovation of ITS Franklin as follows:

• A minimum of 2 people in an office and up to 6 people in some offices.
• Trying work environment that includes noise, smells, loss of heat and cooling, and times without water or restrooms.
• Unisex and port-a-johns.
• Extremely difficult entry and exit access to the building, making it difficult to report to work or leave to go home as well as difficult to receive deliveries or for reports and checks to be delivered to or picked up by business unit customers.
• Interrupted work schedules due to construction, including unplanned outages requiring extra hours to maintain and/or restore services as well as several planned outages that were necessary to allow construction and renovation to continue on schedule.

During this time checks were processed and delivered on schedule, calendar year-end and fiscal year-end reporting were completed as required and on schedule, and business was conducted normally or as near normal as circumstances permitted without loss of customer confidence or extended business interruptions. These employees are to be commended for the exemplarily and professional manner in which they carried out their job duties and responsibilities.

Ibiblio director Paul Jones made the news recently as a final judge for the newly created Blooker Prize, the first international competition to judge publications called “blooks.”

“To enter the competition, a work has to start as a blog and end up as a book,” said Jones. “There will be three categories: fiction, nonfiction and comics.”

The prize was created by Lulu, a provider of print-on-demand books that often creates blooks out of blogs. Jones will be joined by fellow judges Robin Miller, the editor-in-chief of Open Source Technology Group and a freelance writer; and Cory Doctorow, European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and an author, activist and speaker.

“The contest coordinators at Lulu were looking for people hip to the blog scene who had some literary background… and that wouldn’t be ashamed to judge something called the Blooker Prize,” said Jones. “We’re all interested in the communications aspect and the expression of ideas with technology.”

Jones explained that blogs and blooks are rooted in many time-tested and well-respected literary works. Charles Dickens specialized in serial writing, creating such novels as Bleak House and Dombey and Son for magazines and journals before compiling them into books. Other blook ancestors include “found manuscripts” like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.

“We know that some of the world’s best literature has come out of this form,” said Jones. “But now, with blogs, the audience can comment on every chapter as you’re writing it. Is it more of a community authoring experience that way? That’s what we wonder. Will we see a new kind of writing that’s better? More innovative? Will it be a throwback to Dickens and Defoe?

“We hope that interaction with the readership in the process of writing might affect the writing in a positive way.” –HKC

As most staff have heard by now, ITS employees in ITS Franklin are using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP, pronounced voyp) phones. ITS Telecommunications is working to promote the features and mitigate the concerns associated with the devices.

While traditional telephones use circuit switches to create a direct connection between the two ends of the conversation, these phones route voice chats over the Internet or IP networks. The phones in ITS Franklin actually connect to a data port instead of a normal phone jack.

VoIP phones are quickly taking hold in businesses due to several advantages they offer. VoIP systems are often cheaper than traditional phone plans, they work anywhere Internet access is available and they offer many extras related to Internet messaging and information sharing.

“VoIP phones are the first step in a real-time communications framework being laid by ITS Telecommunications to unify voice, video and instant messaging,” said Telecom employee Justin Church. “When completed, this framework will offer VoIP users a number of features, including unified messaging (the ability to receive voice mail as an e-mail), the ability to control how and when calls are received through the use of personalized call processing rules, clickable dialing and advanced directory services.”

VoIP phones also present some concerns. One of the largest concerns recently has been the ability to dial 911 using a VoIP phone during an emergency, and the ability of emergency services to detect where the call is coming from. Telecommunications staff assure ITS employees that the ITS Franklin phones are able to connect to emergency services.

“All VoIP phones being deployed at ITS Franklin and other campus locations are capable of dialing 911,” said Church. “No VoIP phone is deployed without thorough verification of 911 dialing behavior and confirmation of the location information received by UNC’s Department of Public Safety. In addition, any campus location that is solely dependent on VoIP, such as ITS Franklin, has a number of strategically placed regular (analog) phones to provide 911 services in the event of a VoIP outage.”

Another issue is the safety of information being communicated over the Internet. Church says that protecting voice-carrying IP packets is a major part of any VoIP security plan. The same technology that makes Web-based credit card transactions safe is used in VoIP to encrypt media, which makes recovering voice from captured packets impossible.

“We are working to incorporate this technology into the developing UNC VoIP architecture in the very near future,” Church said. “However, voice traffic currently traverses the campus network unencrypted. Threats to voice traffic are being mitigated by completely isolating voice traffic from other data traffic on the campus network, and access to voice segments is strictly controlled. Furthermore, all voice calls outside the campus VoIP system exit the campus via PSTN gateways, so no voice ever leaves the campus network as IP packets. This reduces the number of potential threats to those found inside the campus.”

VoIP phones in ITS Franklin look very similar to the phones ITS staff have already been using. They offer many of the same features as the current phones, but do not interface with them. This means that users of IP phones can forward calls and messages to each other, but not to other campus phones. They cannot 5-digit dial campus numbers, but can 7-digit dial without dialing 9 first.

To smooth the Centrex-VoIP transition, Telecommunications has hosted several training sessions. Information is also available online at http://www.unc.edu/rd/cisco_info.html.–HKC

Campus Webmasters is a peer support group for people who are involved in anything Web-related, from interface design to content management to systems administration. Yes, those are widely varied responsibilities with very different kinds of expertise. Some meetings will be more appropriate for techies; some will be more appropriate for content gurus. To join the group, which offers a listserv and monthly meetings, point your Web browser to http://lists.unc.edu/read/all_forums/subscribe?name=webmasters. See the Events sidebar for details on this month’s meeting, Thursday, Dec. 1.