Leila Burrell-Davis: Personal Home Page

It's almost exactly two-and-a-half years since I first saw Pentre House, so I can hardly believe that we are moving at last. The furniture van went up yesterday (many thanks to Beemoved for their extremely efficient and friendly service). We plan to follow on or around 2nd November.

I've set up a very rudimentary web page with our contact details at http://www.pentrehouse.com/ and plan to expand and update this in due course. Sometime colleagues and friends who are in the Welshpool area are very welcome to drop in. Do give us a call.

At the end of today, I shall be leaving the University of Sussex for a life of idleness after nearly 22 years here.

My Sussex email address will continue to find me for the time being, as will . IT Services permitting, I'll leave the photos of Pentre here until I sort out a more permanent location. When I do, I'll post the details here, together with any new contact details.

So long, everyone.

A few more photos showing some of the rooms I missed last time plus some of the results of a week's hard work, inside and out, in early May.

In response to a number of requests, here are some pictures of Pentre, mostly taken over a few days in March 2005 and in no particular order. The slideshows were created with Microsoft's HTML slideshow XP powertoy, they are best viewed in IE (sorry). If you use another browser, you will notice that the backward and forward buttons actually take you in the opposite direction to the one you expected.

There are two resolutions: 640x480 and a more modest 320x240.

A collection of links relating to unattended workstation deployment. Very rudimentary at present.

Unattended@SourceForge
UCISA Enterprise Desktop Management event, 1st July 2004
LabMice.Net
Real Men Don't Click

Present: Leila Burrell-Davis (Sussex), Paul Seward (Bristol ResNet team)

http://www.resnet.bristol.ac.uk/

ResNet is nearly 6 years old and pre-dates the Bristol Nomadic service, http://www.nomadic.bristol.ac.uk,
although other sites, including Exeter and Royal Holloway, are using the Nomadic system to provide their own ResNets.

The team have concentrated on providing high-quality readable documentation to keep the support load at reasonable levels. Apparently Exeter have taken (and adapted) much of their documentation which has resulted in a reduction in support load to 20% of previous levels.

There are currently 4.5K network points on ResNet, of which a maximum of 3,800 were live in the past academic year. There are 3 full-time permanent staff dedicated to providing the service and also generally providing support and advice for users' personally-owned computers, home networks, etc. They are currently advertising for a fourth member of the team. The team is entirely responsible for the network, including active equipment, programming ports, firewall, traffic management, etc. They employ a team of 10 students to staff the ResNet helpdesk (open 2-8pm in term time) and do room visits.

If students have problems with their machines, they can bring them to the helpdesk and get 5-10 minutes help free of charge. Longer than that costs a flat £15 - no fix, no fee. If a student wants someone to come to their study/bedroom, that too costs £15 and that sum is passed on to the student who takes the call. They use a rather elderly call-logging system that assigns a job to the nearest person (usually living in the same hall) and emails them the details.

The service charge is £20 per term and £15 for the summer vacation. There is a discount for a 3-term subscription (£55) or full year (£70). There is a user satisfaction survey every summer, http://www.resnet.bristol.ac.uk/survey/2004/, and feedback is generally very good.

Network ports in rooms are set to 10Mbs and students are allowed to use as much on-campus bandwidth as they want. There is a 40Mbs ResNet pipe for off-campus access (15Mbs upstream). They use a Canadian traffic management system called Dyband, http://www.dyband.net/news/releases/030904.htm,
which cost about 6-7K, runs on a Linux box and manages traffic per IP address. They also looked at Packeteer, http://www.packeteer.com/. Dyband has helped a lot to prevent bandwidth abuse over the past year and the perceived network speed has gone up dramatically.

The ResNet firewall currently runs in default-allow mode. They wouldn't do that today and are trying to move to default-deny. They've had a lot of copyright infringement email (from copyright owners) over the last year (10 a day at one point). They cut the connection of infringers for a week and get them to come in for 'counselling'. They ask them to remove the files and the peer-to-peer software and warn them that a second breach will result in full disciplinary action. They are also planning to charge an administration fee for reconnection.

If machines are spreading viruses/worms, they are also cut off and helped to remove the offending programs, patch their machines, etc. One of this summer's tasks is to automate some of these procedures.

The team is multi-skilled and while each member has particular strengths, they all try to provide cover for one another and clearly feel a group responsibility for the service. Certainly Paul was very well informed about all aspects of it. Current strengths include documentation, network managment, scripting and Unix/Linux server management, budget/admin. The new appointment will spend time on client-side development or installing and configuring software, e.g. uninstalling other providers A/V software and installing their own, installing any required client software (e.g. management agent), etc.

The service is now completely self-financing, although the initial network infrastructure was paid for up front. Bristol don't run a computer shop any more but the ResNet team sell NICs, patch leads, etc.

Given the poor television reception in many residences, a suggestion has been made to stream FreeView channels over the network, though they aren't sure what the licensing implications of this would be.

Wireless in Bristol

In my travels around Bristol and the University, I kept an eye out for wireless networks and came across signs and signals for the Nomadic wireless network in several University buildings. When I enquired whether it would be possible to use it with the wireless Palm Tungsten C I had with me, I was told that PDAs couldn't be used because they do not support PPPoE which they use to authenticate the connections. The ResNet team are currently investigating writing PPPoE software for PocketPC but have no plans to do so for Palm devices.

Somewhat to my surprise, I found a strong wireless signal in my room at the Bristol Travel Inn, http://www.travelinn.co.uk/TI/index.jsp?page=inn&id=256. This was a gateway to commercial provider Swisscom Eurospot, http://www.swisscom-eurospot.com/. Interestingly, for people without a wireless card, in their laptop they advertised the loan of a wireless device that plugged into the USB and LAN ports and which they said required no drivers to be installed or changes to be made to the machine configuration. If I'd had a laptop with me, I would have tried it out. Not having one, I went out to dinner.

Chose a new blogger template, Sand Dollar, and decided to see how this works as my home page. Deleted most of the previous test posts.

The wireless trial has now become a service. Further details at IT Services Roaming web site.

Initial experiments with Blogger.