We finally got power in our house in Higganum, CT on Friday, 9/2. That was 5 1/2 days without electricity. I believe there are still 2% of the Connecticut Light & Power customers who do not have power. We were looking at the CT river as we drove past it and it looks muddy and unclean – who knows what contaminants have gotten into it. I also saw the kind of destruction Irene brought to Vermont – it is unbelievable that a Hurricane which struck North Carolina was so potent that 1400 miles or so further, it still had the punch to cause so much damage. And now Lee is dumping all the rains. I have never ever paid so much attention to weather in my life!

Another academic year has begun. It is not what it used to be 10-15 years ago for the technology support staff. It is true that we experience high call volumes at this time, but, I remember many of us losing sleep over the first few weeks of the Fall semester. Things have changed tremendously as they should.

I think we have had a fantastic start so far. Over 95+ of all students were connected to the network within 48 hours. I remember that in 1995 the last person to be connected to ResNet (as it was referred to at Wesleyan) was in November. We changed a lot of things around (speeding up the registration process through a home grown system, hiring external help for the first few weeks of the semester in the computer store etc. etc.) and cut down the time to go on the network dramatically in the following year.

We have many faculty members using Sakai for their classes, some administrators using Google Groups for communication, Over 3500 users on Google, Portal usage increasing because of single path to many of these external services etc. I should confess that we have had some hiccups in some of these systems but we have been able to solve them fairly quickly.

Now, the computers are more powerful, software is more mature, network capacity is becoming less of an issue, so why should it still take so long for us to connect the computers to the network. It is mainly to preserve the sanity of the network for the larger community. We want to make sure that the computers coming from all over the world with very diverse configurations and computing capabilities are not going to cause issues with the network.

We want to make sure that they are “clean”, that the machine has been patched and that there are certain software such as virus protection software are installed and running on the system. This requires that they are compliant in the eyes of Cisco Clean Access , the software that administers Network Admission Control. We specify some basic requirements that the machine connecting to the network must pass in order to be admitted to the network.

There has been considerable debate about using such systems in today’s environment and the return on investment. For obvious reasons, I will not go into the details. Regardless of this debate or whether we should be using these systems, what is most important is that we protect our servers and software as tightly as we can.

This year, the start of the semester pains have been different because we care going through a major transition. We still have a few users left on FirstClass, while most have moved to Google. Then we have Sakai Fora and Google Groups – where do I go to communicate? We are working hard to communicate in ways to clarify these issues, but as you can imagine, it is circular – where do you communicate when the confusion itself is about the communication medium?

Finally, I hope you are planning to attend the LTS Expo tomorrow. We have a lot of great programming planned and have invited a few vendors to talk about their products. It is from 10 AM to 3 PM in Clapp Library – hope to see you there!