As a result, Hotmail and Live.com are both blocking mail from Gustavus.

Unfortunately , Microsoft does not give us any ability to lift the ban and we have to wait for them to do it automatically.

I thought that this would be a good “teachable incident.” Please do not EVER reply to an e-mail with your Gustavus password or put your Gustavus password into a web site that does not end in gac.edu or gustavus.edu. Doing so can impact everyone at Gustavus. As a result of this incident, people can’t send e-mails to potential employers, friends, or grandmothers who use hotmail or live.com

Gustavus will never ask for your password by e-mail, and there are no web sites that work with your Gustavus password that don’t end in gac.edu or gustavus.edu.

If you ever have a question about whether a e-mail or web site is legitimate PLEASE call the technology helpline at x6111 or e-mail helpline@gustavus.edu before you give them your password.

For example, the Google Calendar events we populate for student’s schedules can have a link to the Moodle course in them, and if a student clicks on the link they will go directly to the course without needing to reauthenticate. A professor could create a google doc spreadsheet for students to enter their lab results into and then embed it or link to it in their moodle course and the user experience would be seamless.

Currently, the Single Sign On system is used by Google Calendar, Moodle, the GTS Tools Page, and Media Services.

Moving forward, we hope to include more of Gustavus’ web resources into our Single Sign On solution so that we can easily customize content without constantly asking for people’s passwords.

Do you have an idea of a Gustavus service you’d like to be included? Post it in the comments or e-mail webmaster@gustavus.edu

Sometimes those requests are for places we never would have thought of as “places someone would want wireless.”

For example, we’ve received several requests for better coverage for the cardio equipment in lund. People want to stream music to their iPod touches and iPhones while running, or surf the web while riding a bike. As of today, we believe the cardio equipment should be covered much better than before. Stream away.

Another request we got, when we were asking people how the new wireless network in Norelius works, was for coverage in the laundry room. When we went to investigate we found that while one laundry room was covered well (there are two in Norelius) the other had almost no signal. We added a new access point to a closet nearby and students should now be able to do their homework (or check facebook) while waiting for their laundry to dry.

Where have you taken out your laptop and be disappointed to not find a signal? Where has your iPod Touch not served your need to be constantly connected? Let us know, and we’ll continue to try to make things better.

In addition, our current system of dealing with guests seems to cause a lot of confusion. Non-guests register as guests and then wonder why they can’t get to webmail and guests don’t scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the guest registration form.

In order to fix both of these issues, we are changing how we configure our wireless access points to create several wireless networks for the dorms as well as a dedicated wireless network for guests.

What does this mean for you?

Once the system is fully reconfigured, everywhere on campus guests will connect to the wireless network named “GustieGuest.”
In the dorms, students will connect to the wireless network with the name of their dorm (eg. Norelius, Southwest, Pittman, etc.) The library will continue to be “GACLibrary.” All other buildings on campus will continue to have a “GACwireless” network for now.

As we convert each dorm, users will need to search for wireless networks and join the appropriate network.

We hope that this will greatly improve wireless network performance in the evenings. Please let us know how it is working for you by e-mailing root@gac.edu or commenting on this post.

Right now, if you go to http://google.gustavus.edu you will be prompted with a log in page. (Thanks to the web team for the snazzy design.) If you then go to the GTS Tools page you don’t have to log in again.

We hope to expand the Single Sign On service to most other web services at Gustavus, including Webmail, the Gribly, and Moodle, in the next few months.

If you go to http://google.gustavus.edu you can log in with your Gustavus username and password and take a look.

If you are a Faculty member or Student, all your fall term courses have been pre-populated. That has two effects, first it means you don’t need to enter your course schedule by hand, and second it means that even if someone else never logs into google calendar you can still attempt to schedule a meeting with them and know it won’t conflict with their courses.

We’ve started writing a “Getting Started guide” which you can find here: https://gustavus.edu/gts/Google_Calendar

Please take a look and give us any feedback or questions you’ve got. (e-mail root@gac.edu) We’d love to hear what you have to say. Google Calendar is a remarkable product and we’d love to help you use it as effectively as possible.

We think we have found something which is a great improvement on horde, the current webmail program, but we’d like to hear what you think, since you are the ones who use webmail most.

Give it a try! Click here

Send us an e-mail to root@gac.edu and let us know what you think!

We’ve tried to do some user education to encourage people to download things from the web from other colleges and universities when possible, but what if you want to download something which is available using bittorrent? (Such as the many legal movie downloads at http://www.legaltorrents.com/ or Linux install CDs.)

We’ve created a list of all the “non-Internet2″ ip addresses on the Internet, which should allow you to download only from Internet2 sites. In addition to using a less costly resource (Internet2) instead of a more costly resource (Commodity Internet,) I’ve also found that downloading using bittorrent from only Internet2 speeds up the downloads a lot.

You can set up uTorrent or Azureus to use this list by following the directions below.

For uTorrent, download http://homepages.gac.edu/~sommere/ipfilter.dat and put that file in “c:documents and settings[your user]Application DatauTorrent” (”Application Data” will be hidden, so you will need to change your settings to show hidden files.) Then go into uTorrent’s settings, to Advanced Settings, Enter “ipfilter.enable” in the text box and click “Set.” Any torrents you start downloading after doing this should only download from Internet2. If you want to disable this later, just set ipfilter.enable to false in the advanced settings.

For Azureus, install the “SafePeer” plugin. Then go to the Plugins menu and select “SafePeer.” Make sure the Blocklist is on, and then go to the blocklist tab. Change the Blocklist URL to http://homepages.gac.edu/~sommere/spconfig.txt and click save. Then restart Azureus. New downloads should all use only Internet2.

Remember, you should only use bittorrent to download things you have a legal right to download, and that whenever you download something using bittorrent you are also allowing other users to download the same file from you. While there may be fewer RIAA “agents” on Internet2, there almost certainly are some.

By gathering and analysing this data, we’ve been able to make several dramatic system improvements. Most notably, we are now bypassing our spam scanner for any mail sent from an authenticated Gustavus user or Facebook. This should make delivering mail to other Gustavus users much faster and reduce the load on our spam scanning servers because they only have to scan about 15% of their old load so they should give faster results for everything else too.

I know what you’re thinking – “What if someone spams my facebook account!?” – well… our spam scanner wouldn’t catch it anyway since the message from facebook would just say something pointless like “Bob has posted on your wall” and not the actual spam message.

If you’ve got any other suggestions of statistics which might be useful or ways to use this information, we’d love to look into it! Just send an e-mail to root@gac.edu.

This year about 70% of students on Gustavus’ network have made use of the wireless network. In fact, more freshmen have registered their computer on the wireless network than the wired network.