It turns out that our internet connection went down at about 12:15am and didn’t come back up until 6:44am. Considerably longer than the “loss of service for up to one hour during the window” our ISP warned us about.

Anyway, everything is back up and running now and the next time we are notified of an upcoming outage, no matter how small, I will be sure to make more announcements about it ahead of time.

Sorry for the inconvenience I am sure this caused last night.

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.

Other infected computers have tried to pass along bad DNS servers to others on the network and get them to use the malicious DNS servers as well. This is what was causing network issues in Pittman and Sohre last night.

To help us combat this we have decided to block access to DNS servers that are not on our campus.  The OpenDNS servers are an exception to this rule.  Also, the ssh server is allowed to use any DNS server so if you need to use nslookup or dig to query external DNS servers, you can do it from there.

Unless you know something about DNS and have specifically configured your computer to not use the Gustavus DNS servers, you should not have to change anything due to this.

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.

This is a time-lapse video of the Don Roberts ice rink going from the final stages of the 2008 Nobel Conference to the newly repaired ice rink. Earlier this year the cooling system failed and had to be replaced. In this video you can see the removal of the old cooling system followed by the installation of the new cooling system. If you ever wanted to see what is down there below the ice, here is your chance.

The video was created by taking a photo every minute from October 9th through November 30th and stitching them together. To try and shorten the video I removed most of the images where not much was happening such as each night and some of the weekends.

[UPDATE Thursday Morning] By 1:00am Thursday morning the fiber cut had been repaired and our internet connection restored to its normal state.

[UPDATE 11:15pm] At about 11:00pm a temporary alternate route was put in place. ( Thanks HickoryTech! ) It might be somewhat slower than our normal connection, but it is much better than nothing. Once the fiber cut is repaired, our connection will go down again for a short time as we are switched back to our regular route.

[UPDATE 7:30pm] Well, that was quick. As soon as I finished that post I learned that there fiber cut incident. It was cut some where between St. Peter and Le Seuer. No estimate on when it will be fixed yet.

So basically this post is saying, yep there was some problem some where, but it was not our fault