FEATURE ARTICLE

CTS has some end of the semester reminders for students:

1. If you need to use a computer lab late at night to complete final course work, there are computers available 24 hours in the Penfield Library 24 hour room, however printing is not available here. Printing in the main Penfield computer lab is available during normal hours of the library.  In addition, Snygg Computer lab is open 24 hours, Monday through Friday effective Sunday, April 22nd through May 18th.  Printing is available at this location.
2. Make sure you have enough print pages to finish up your course work.  You can check your print quota balance at the CTS Account Tools web page.  Just login and click on “Check your print quota.”  If you are running low or have already ran out and still need to print, more print pages can be purchased in $5.00 allotments from the Telecommunications office in 105 Culkin Hall.
3. If you are living in the residence halls, CTS requests that you place your ResNet hub, power supply, and network cable in a plastic bag available from the front desk of your building before moving out.  Please hang the bag on a coat hook in your room near the door.  If these items are not left in your room, you may be charged for them.
4. Before leaving campus, make sure you have set your security question for your SUNY Oswego computer account. When you leave for the summer and come back in the fall, you may find that you have forgotten your computer account password.  The normal methods of getting your password reset are to show your College ID or drivers license to our staff at the Technology Support Center in 26 Lanigan Hall or by faxing or snail mailing a notarized letter.  If you set the security question, you can avoid these methods and just answer your security question to reset your password.  Just go to the CTS Account Tools web site and click on “Forgot Your Password” at the bottom left of the page.
5. If you subscribe to any CTS telephone plan, final statements will be mailed to your home address. Please email phone@oswego.edu with any changes of address.  A hold will be put on all accounts with an outstanding balance.

CTS wishes you a successful end to your semester and for our returning students a safe and warm summer!  For those that are graduating, we wish you well on your new journeys!

ANGEL – Training sessions for new users

The ANGEL training team has been working hard on training faculty who are migrating their fully online SLN or web-enhanced CourseSpace courses to the new ANGEL environment.  Approximately 70 faculty have been trained and have had their courses migrated over to ANGEL.  We will now be opening up training to new users – faculty that have not previously used an online learning management system component for their courses.  Two training sessions will be offered during the CELT sponsored Spring BreakOut.  The beginning workshop will be on Tuesday, May 22nd followed by an add-on workshop on Wednesday, May 23rd.  In addition, training sessions for existing faculty and new SUNY Oswego faculty are being planned for the end of August.  Consult the ANGEL web site for future announcements on exact dates and times.

Professional Development

CTS will be offering sessions during the CELT sponsored Spring BreakOut on Monday, May 21st.  Look for sessions on intermediate and advanced Microsoft Powerpoint, controlling SPAM, and PC Maintenance.

Notes from the Help Desk

The Technology Support Center (help desk) is now offering live chat.  Just go to our web page and use the web-based chat utility to ask our staff a technology-related question. Hours for live chat questions are Monday through Friday 8am to 4:30pm.

We have been receiving questions at the help desk from New York Mets fans living in the residence hall rooms about the Sports New York (SNY) channel being removed from the cable TV line up. The analog channel line up is determined by contract with Time Warner. That contract has been in effect since 2004.   Most recently, when Time Warner (TW) was upgrading their system, TW made a mistake and put the Sports New York (SNY) network on channel 22 instead of Fox Sports.  Fox Sports is the contracted channel. In December 2006, this mistake was corrected by Time Warner.  We are not sure how long the Sports New York (SNY) network was running incorrectly. To request the Sports New York network be a part of the contracted channels with Time Warner, we believe students can go through their dorm directors to request changes.

Did You Know?

Did you know that you have an email quota? Email quotas are allocated to each user of the system to prevent the amount of electronic storage growing beyond system resources.  For faculty and staff, your email quota is 100MB.  For students, it is 50MB. To determine your current email usage and verify your allocated quota, please login to the CTS Account Tools web page and click on the "Check Email Quota" link. Your current usage of mail quota will be displayed.  We recommend your email usage stay at least 10-20MB less than your allocated amount to allow for storage of new email.  Please note that once you reach or exceed your allocated amount, you will not be able to send or receive new email.

Wireless Computing with Vista

Cisco systems, the maker of the VPN software required to use SUNY Oswego’s wireless computing service, just released a version of the software that works with the Microsoft Vista operating system as well as Windows XP and 2000.  CTS is in the process of testing the client internally and should have it available for download to our users by summer.

SAS is a mathematical statistics software used by various faculty and students on campus for teaching and research. This is commercial software that requires the renewal of a license each year. Our existing SAS license will be expiring June 15, 2007. SAS has changed their licensing and are now offering an Education Analytic Suite with two options, Teaching/Research and/or Administrative. From our sales representative, these two options include the following:

Teaching/Research: As defined by SAS, software used for purposes of classroom instruction, academic research, and course work primarily related to customer’s post- secondary degree requirements. Used by students, faculty, and staff supporting such use.

Administrative: As defined by SAS, software used for purposes directly related to customer’s operations as a post-secondary degree granting institution. This includes institutional research and any such use related to reporting about the University to the University. Such software may be used by customer’s administrative employees (including faculty performing administrative duties) for such administrative purposes.

We believe we fall into the Teaching/Research option, but we need to talk with the SAS users on campus to be sure. Please contact Nicole Decker, decker@oswego.edu, by May 18th if you are a SAS user.

In addition, SAS’s licensing is changing from a concurrent user license to a PC install license. Currently, we purchase 100 licenses and no more than 100 users can use SAS at a time. Therefore, we install it in all of the computer labs on campus. Moving to a PC install means that we would need to purchase more licenses to cover all of the computer labs. We may need to look at restricting which computer labs it is installed in to cover costs.

As mentioned in our March 2007 newsletter, CTS purchased additional bandwidth over winter break that took us from 45 to 95Mbps. If you recall in that article, bandwidth is the amount of Internet traffic on campus that can be funnelled all at one time to our Internet Service provider.  If the amount of network traffic exceeds the size of our “funnel” then network speeds slow down.  The increase from 45 to 95Mbps was an intermediary step to eventually get us to 150Mbps which we hoped to do by the end of the Spring 2007 semester.  As of mid-April 2007, our campus bandwidth has been increased to 150Mbps.  We hope this increase will create a better experience for our users while using network applications.

The following are projects that CTS is working on that will be coming up in the next few months:

• Email System Upgrade: CTS completed internal testing of  the Communications Express web mail reader which found some odd behavior in using certain parts of the application.  We are currently looking into the problems associated with these issues.  Once resolved, we will be opening testing to members of the Technology Advisory Board for feedback.
• Mailing List Software Replacement:  CTS has been working on installing the Listserv and Mailman mailing list software on our email test system for further evaluation and internal testing.  We are looking to replace the majordomo mailing list software with a more user friendly version that will allow mailing list owners and subscribers management of their lists from a web interface.  We looked at five packages and have narrowed the selection down to Listserv and Mailman. Once the packages have been installed and tested internally within CTS, we will be asking for user feedback.
• Web Server Upgrade:  CTS has purchased a new web server to replace the existing aging system.  In addition, CTS has purchased a test system that will allow us to test upgrades of software without modifying the production system. The equipment for both systems has arrived and has been installed. We will be working on configuring, upgrading core Web applications, and then testing them this semester.  This project has slowed somewhat due to staffing.  Two of the people involved in this project (the Web Coordinator and a CTS Technology Support Professional) have accepted positions at other organizations.  We are still hoping for a late summer implementation.
• Continued Microsoft Vista and IE 7 testing: CTS is working on fixing applications that may not work with Microsoft Vista and Internet Explorer version 7.  We hope to have all testing and application problems resolved by the start of the Fall 2007 semester.  Problematic applications include wireless computing with Vista, editing of web pages with OU Campus and OU Educate using Internet Explorer (IE) version 7, Banner with IE 7, and ResNet activation.  Also, please be aware that the SUNY Learning Network (SLN) using the Lotus Notes environment does not work in Vista.  There are no plans to get it working as the Lotus Notes application is no longer supported by IBM.

If you have any questions related to any of these projects, please contact the Technology Support Center at x3456 or by email to help@oswego.edu.

Donation-ware application BackityMac provides a quick and easy way to backup your Macintosh's critical data. Supported files include:

- Apple Mail Files
- MS Entourage Files
- iCal Calendars
- Address Book database
- Safari, Firefox, Camino bookmarks
- iPhoto and iTunes Libraries
- iWeb website files
- Home Documents folder
- Full home folder backups

BackityMac's simplified interface eliminates the need to hunt around your Macintosh's hard drive for all the necessary files or folders. Simply check off items you want to back up, and BackityMac rolls them into a disk image that is easily transferable to alternate media (such as a USB jump drive).  

Do you use programs like Kazaa, Bit Torrent, Gnutella, or Limewire to listen and share music files?  Did you know that you could be violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) by doing so?  This could impose fines, jail time, and lawyer’s fees.

The DMCA was passed in 1998 to help protect copyrighted material from being copied and shared digitally.  This includes copyrighted music and songs.  If you are downloading music that is copyrighted and haven’t paid for it, you are violating the DMCA.  If you are ripping copyrighted CDs onto your computer and then sharing them, you are violating the DMCA.  The Recording Industry is aggressively targeting university students who are violating this act.  Sometimes, SUNY Oswego receives notices from the Recording Industry of specific people they have found violating the DMCA.  SUNY Oswego immediately turns off the network connection to the computer illegally sharing the files upon receipt of such notices.  A consultation is done with the owner of the computer with either CTS or Judicial Affairs and could impose sanctions.

Check out the CTS DMCA web page for more information.