Wi-Fi Access for the new Session at RGU

It’s now the beginning of September and time to restart the IT Blog after a bit of a break over the summer. It might have been a break as far as the blog is concerned, but it has been a busy period of time for IT Services. For the first blog post of the new Session I thought I would update you on some of the changes we have been making to the Wi-Fi system on Campus.

Last year we rolled out a new system, based on “eduroam”. For many people it worked well from the outset, but we know from feedback that others had problems connecting to Wi-Fi, especially in the earlier part of the Session. We also know that we did not have sufficient Wi-Fi cover in all parts of the campus and this was frustrating for people trying to connect in areas where there was a poor signal.

I’d like to start with a reminder on how to connect and the key benefit of “eduroam.” If you look at the Wi-Fi networks available on campus you should see two in particular:

RGU_Connect
eduroam

The very first time you connect any device to our Wi-Fi, you should use RGU_connect. This will ask you to enter your RGU username and password, and will guide you through a series of steps to automatically set up your device to connect to the eduroam Wi-Fi service. Don’t try to set up the eduroam service manually – it won’t work.

After you have done this, you should not normally need to use RGU_Connect on that device again. Please don’t try to configure RGU_Connect to use as your main Wi-Fi network- it is not designed for this, and you will prevent others from being able to log in. Once you have completed the initial setup, your device should from then on automatically connect to the eduroam service. If you have more than one device, then you will have to go through RGU_Connect once on each device you wish to use.

You will find full instructions for all the main device types in the IT Help Desk website.

You may find when moving around the Campus that eduroam occasionally drops the signal so that it can reconnect to the Wi-Fi access points in your new location – sometimes this can take a minute or two but it should connect again automatically. If your device for any reason is not connecting, try turning Wi-Fi off for a minute or so and then back on.

If you find that your device does not automatically connect to eduroam or you are having persistent problems connecting, then please do contact the IT Help Desk for assistance. It’s important for us to know if people are having specific problems so that we can resolve them.

Eduroam is an International service used by Universities and Colleges across the world. This means that once you have successfully set up your device to connect to eduroam at RGU, it will also automatically connect to eduroam at any other University or college in the UK or the world that uses eduroam. You don’t need to do anything else to set this up. In summary, eduroam is your normal Wi-Fi service when you are on our Campus or visiting another institution.

We are aware that some “apps” on mobile platforms do not work fully across our Wi-Fi system. We do not block any apps deliberately, but we believe that the design of some apps is such that they do not operate across some of the network management tools that we use, in common with many other large organisations. We are continuing to look at what we can do to alleviate this.

As far as coverage goes, we have been installing additional access point across all of our campus buildings. This is a major piece of work which has been taking place over the summer, and should be completed by the start of Semester. This means that you will get a good wireless signal inside most areas in our buildings.

Goodbye St Andrew Street!

Moving a data centre from one location to another without disrupting the organisation is a major undertaking. We moved one data centre to a shared facility with the University of Aberdeen and North East Scotland College last year successfully, and on the weekend of 24th / 25th May we moved our second data centre from St Andrew Street down to a new purpose built facility on our Garthdee Campus. This one will also be shared with the University of Aberdeen and North East Scotland College.

The St Andrew Street building has been the University’s IT hub pretty much since IT began. When the national JANET network came into being, its main entry point was into St Andrew Street, and for many years the University’s main computer room was there, with network links to the rest of the Campus. The St Andrew Street building will be sold at the end of June, and this data centre move is part of a wider set of tasks to decommission the whole building. This has involved re-routing our external fibre connections (sorry about the roadworks!), and significant changes to the University’s overall Campus network so that we can unplug St Andrew St.

Down at Garthdee, there was construction work to build the new data centre, and this also involved significant changes to the Campus network at Garthdee so that the new data centre was connected into our network. All this work has been going on quietly over the past several months stage by stage.

Prior to the weekend of 24th / 25th of May, all of our critical systems had to be switched so that they were running fully from the North East Shared Data centre at the University of Aberdeen. That allowed the IT team over the weekend in May to shut everything down at St Andrew Street, move it down the road, and bring it back up again without any disruption. Once everything was up and running, critical services had to be rebalanced to run across the two data centres.

The School of Computing and Digital Media also had to move their servers from St Andrew Street down to the new data centre and they had completed their physical moves ahead of the 24th and 25th of May.

In a couple of weeks, the three remaining University departments will leave the St Andrew Street building for ever. Once they are gone, IT Engineers will disconnect the building and decommission the internal networks – that truly will represent the end of an era for us, but we are looking forward to moving down to Garthdee!
 
Here is the St Andrew Street Data centre before the move:

 
And here it is looking pretty empty after everything was moved down to Garthdee:

And here is the new datacenter down at Garthdee:

 

Quick update on IT

Wow, where does the time go? I haven’t posted on the Blog since February – that’s bad, sorry about that. There has been lots happening since then, so here is a quick general update.

On Wireless, we still had a few problems with the new system but we have had great feedback from students through Facebook and face-to-face and this has really helped IT Services to identify and work through some of the problems. As I said in January, we can see from our logs that large numbers of people have been able to connect and use the system successfully, but we knew from feedback that quite a few were still having problems. We’ve worked with the manufacturer and have made a number of changes to the controllers and feedback from students now is that it is greatly improved. We still have to extend the coverage to ensure that all areas on the Campus are covered, and that is now planned for the summer.

We have been looking at the “old Library” area in the Aberdeen Business School and are right now finalising plans to put in more IT workstations, a help point, AV facilities, and better group work areas for students to use. IT Services along with Estates are just in the process of finalising cost estimates, and hopefully that will be approved and the work will commence in the near future.

Behind the scenes, IT Services are working hard on preparations to move our St Andrew Street datacentre. We moved one of our datacentres last year to the shared datacentre at University of Aberdeen and now we are moving the other one. It’s going into a new facility which we are also sharing with the University of Aberdeen so by the summer we will have all of our server kit in two new state of the art datacentres, each with environmentally friendly cooling and generator backup. We are moving ourselves too – once we get the datacentre out of St Andrew St the three remaining departments will move out of there and we will have to disconnect all the IT and remove the building from our Campus network. St Andrew St has been one of our main “hubs” for IT since IT began, so this is very much going to be the end of an era!

This is the time of year when Schools and Departments submit their planning statements for the forthcoming year and we are also looking at all of the IT related project requests so that we can update our forward plans. These are all going through the approval process as I write, and once things are finalised I’ll put a summary on the blog. Some of the key areas we are likely to be looking at are:

– A major investment in our storage and server infrastructure to replace end of life equipment and increase capacity and performance;
– Improvements to our Learning tools, including an upgrade to Moodle and improvements to access to Library e-resources
– Enhancements to our portfolio of communication tools to provide new video conference facilities across the Campus, more flexible access to telephony services and integrated access to Skype communications;
– Enhancements to the Staff and Student portal (RGyoU), particularly looking at the provision of more information for students in one place, and better document management and collaborative tools for staff;
– A new system for managing student placements
– Preparation for the opening of the new Scott Sutherland School of Architecture at Riverside East

These are just a few highlights – just as importantly we plan to spend some considerable time on preparatory work for initiatives which will start the following year, but more of that later.

Responsive Web

A new version of RGU’s web site went live this morning, with a new design based on the concept of “responsive web design.” The Wikipedia entry for responsive web design summarises it as follows:

“Responsive Web design (RWD) is a Web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors).”

If you look at the new RGU home page on a full screen PC, or large tablet format such as an iPad, it will look pretty much like before (although there have also been additional improvements made along with the implementation of responsive design):

If, however, you look at it on a smaller screen size such as an iPhone or similar, it will look like this:

The layout of the page is now optimised for the smaller screen size, so that you no longer have to “pinch and zoom” to get the areas you are interested in to a size where you can read them.

Have a look yourself!

Update on Wireless Service

First of all, a Happy New Year to all staff and students at RGU! This blog has been a bit quiet last few weeks so new year resolution is to put more out on the blog.

Back in August, I gave an update on our plans for improving the wireless service on our Garthdee campus. Our plan then was to install the new service, based on “Eduroam”, in Riverside East and the refurbished space in Aberdeen Business School, followed by a rollout to the rest of the Campus to replace the previous system. We had hoped that the previous system would have been able to operate for an interim period of time until we completed the full rollout of Eduroam, but unfortunately it continued to cause problems from the start of Semester.

So, we decided to quickly replace all the wireless access points on the old system so that Eduroam is now the only wireless system on Campus. We also installed additional access points in the refurbished ABS Foyer and that has greatly improved the cover there.

However, we don’t yet have wireless coverage across all areas on Garthdee and we are working to extend this over the next few months. At the moment, the whole of Riverside East is covered, the open central areas in Aberdeen Business School, and Faculty of Health and Social Care are covered, Sports Centre and a number of open areas and meeting rooms in the other buildings. Until we get the cover extended, you may find some rooms where the wireless signal is not strong enough to give you a good connection – it’s not broken, it’s just that we haven’t yet brought the new system to these areas.

We know that WiFi is an important service for our users. Students, as usual, have a wonderful way of expressing their service requirements and one of the Class Reps shared this little pyramid with me – thanks!

IT Services can see from the system logs that many people are using WiFi without any difficulty, but at the end of last year there were a number of people reporting some problems. Remember, there’s good support material which you can find online on the IT Helpdesk’s support pages.

We made a change in December as recommended by the supplier to address some problems in connectivity and “roaming”. What’s “roaming”, you may ask? Well, when your device connects to a wireless network it connects to a wireless access point (transmitter) close to you. If you move around the building, the system has to release you from the original access point and connect you to another one. Technically, that’s a complex process and sometimes, it can take a minute or two for that to settle down, so if you are finding problems with WiFi as you move around, allow the system a bit of time.

Some people have been confused by “RGU Connect” – you only use RGU Connect once, and what it does is configure all the settings on your device. Once you’ve done that, your device should automatically connect to eduroam from then on. Please don’t try to use RGU Connect as your main WiFi – it causes problems for other people trying to connect, and anyway won’t work very well.

IT Services also found last year that some devices worked better than others – this appears to relate to the manufacturer and the operating system – whether its Microsoft, Android or Mac. IT Services hope that the change made in December will have improved these issues but are continuing to monitor and work with the supplier on this.

Some apps that have worked in the past aren’t working fully. Some of these IT Services have been able to fix, others, are more difficult to diagnose. I am aware that Facebook Apps work on some devices but not on others – this is not a University policy to block Facebook!!! IT Services are continuing to work to resolve these issues, although some of this is dependent on getting information from the people that wrote the apps.

When you visit other eduroam campuses (in Aberdeen you can access it at Aberdeen University and NHS teaching hospitals) you will need to turn off “proxy” settings to allow you to use the service there (remember to note what they are before you turn them off!) then switch the proxy settings back on when you come back to RGU – they are normally “proxy.rgu.ac.uk”.

And finally (!) – if you are running a conference or event, remember that IT Services can provide guest logins for the WiFi. Only guests from other Universities will be able to use eduroam, and even then only if their University supports it.

Helping the Environment

I’ve put up a few posts here (Green ICT, How to move 160 Servers, Did You Notice?) about moving our datacentre and how amongst other things this will help the University reduce its environmental footprint. Well, we’ve set up the shared datacentre along with the University of Aberdeen and North East Scotland College and it’s great to see that our achievement has been recognised at national level.

EAUC (The Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges) have an annual Green Gown award ceremony, and the Shared Datacentre was a winner in the category of Modernisation: Effectiveness & Efficiency in the Estate. There’s a wee writeup of this in RGU’s “Green Times”.

The British Computer Society UK IT Industry Awards recognised our venture as a winner in their “datacentre of the year” category.

Computer Weekly has featured the project in their European User Awards as “as an exemplar of public-sector excellence and green efficiency”. It’s worth reading this article for some insight into the slightly trickier moments of the project – “. . . like a Bond movie.”

With this success under our belt, we are now actively pursuing a shared project to develop a backup datacentre – work should start in earnest in January. This one will be on RGU’s Campus and once again will be designed with the environment in mind and take advantage of the abundant supply of cool fresh air of the North East (yes, summer as well as winter) to keep our servers at the optimum temperature without spending a fortune on air conditioning. I’m definitely hoping for a white Christmas . . .

It’s not a side of IT that our staff and students often get to see, but just thought you’d like to know how much we are leading the field here and we’ve managed to achieve by sharing with other institutions. My thanks to RGU IT Staff and colleagues in University of Aberdeen and North East Scotland College!

Connected Aberdeen

Aberdeen and the surrounding regions are widely recognised as a global energy hub and a substantial contributor to the economy. Aberdeen was the only major UK city to grow during the last recession, oil and gas exports are around £7billion annually and 11 of Scotland’s top 25 companies are located in the region.

Driven by the vibrant commercial and residential sectors, there is a growing demand for digital connectivity in the area. There is also a recognition that currently it is behind the curve in the deployment of next generation broadband and that connectivity overall is not in keeping with the region’s role as a global energy hub.

Aberdeen City Council and Aberdeenshire Council are working in partnership on an initiative called “Accelerate Aberdeen” to improve digital connectivity within the City and the immediately surround regions. Late last year it was announced that Aberdeen City had been awarded over £5m from the UK Government “Urban Broadband Fund” to become a ‘Super Connected City’. This is being taken forward in a number of distinct strands and Aberdeen City Council have engaged early on with the two Universities in the city and with North East of Scotland College to ensure that they are involved.

One of the strands is called a “wireless concession” and has been launched as a public tender . Aberdeen City Council wants to see significantly improved mobile and wireless coverage across the city. To achieve this, the Council will allow the successful bidder to use the Council’s lampposts, bus stops, and buildings across the City to install the necessary infrastructure to provide 4G mobile coverage, and WiFi in key areas. It’s fantastic that the Council have recognised the importance of this to the educational institutions in the city. Between the two Universities and the College we probably have over 30,000 learners in the city – the vast majority of whom will rely heavily on good mobile and wireless coverage for communication and accessing modern digital learning resources. Anything that improves connectivity across the city will benefit the learner and research communities and their interaction with enterprises across the city.

Formally, this procurement covers assets owned by Aberdeen City Council. It might also be possible to extend this in a similar way to assets owned by the Universities and the College in order to improve coverage on our campuses, but we’ll need to wait until early 2014 to talk to the successful bidder and see what might be possible here. Will keep you posted.

Start of Semester

First of all, a big welcome from IT Services to all new students who have joined the University this year and welcome back to all students who are returning after their break over the summer. For the IT people, this has been overall the busiest summer we can ever remember, with all the preparation to install the network infrastructure for the opening of Riverside East, refurbishment of the Aberdeen Business School, and rolling out as part of that new Windows 7 desktops, a new printing solution, new audio visual facilities, a new WiFi system and moving one of our datacentres. I’ve written in more detail about these in various other posts over the summer and you can look over them for a bit more background.

We’ve done our best to test all of these over the summer, but it’s not until the start of semester when students return that everything really gets put to the test, and there have been a few teething problems this year. WiFi I know has been difficult in some parts of the Campus. In Riverside East, we put a new WiFi system in, based on “Eduroam.” This is working very well and the great thing is that once you have set it up on your tablet or smartphone, it connects automatically so you don’t have to keep on entering your username and password. The old Wifi system is still around in the rest of the Garthdee Campus and we had originally planned to rollout Eduroam to the rest of the Campus over the next few months. However, we’ve experienced a number of problems with the old WiFi system. We have a temporary solution in place which will keep the old system available, but we are now going to speed up the rollout of Eduroam to the rest of the Campus. This will consist of two phases:

First of all, we will replace all the existing WiFi access points on the old system with new Eduroam ones. That will be fairly quick and we hope can be done in the next 2-3 weeks. However, these access points do not currently cover the whole campus – they mainly cover the more heavily used public areas and teaching spaces. So the next phase will be to add additional access points to bring WiFi to as many as possible of the areas not covered by the current system. This will take a bit longer, as it takes some time to plan the optimum location of new access points.

We’ve had good feedback about the new Windows 7 desktops and those of you who were here last year should see a noticeable improvement. Some people have reported that some of the new desktops “freeze” from time to time for a few seconds, – IT Services are aware of that and are working on a solution along with our supplier.

The new printers are working well and successfully processing thousands of print jobs every day. As it’s a new system, we’ve had a number of calls to the Help Desk for people asking for help and advice, and a small number of specific issues, but hopefully that will settle down now as everyone adapts to the new system.

Talking of the Help Desk – the start of Semester is always a really busy time for the IT Help Desk. There’s normally a steady stream of people who have forgotten their passwords (not you though?) and this year there have been many additional calls from people asking how to use some of the new facilities such as printing and Eduroam WiFi. The graph below shows you clearly how the number of calls to the Help Desk have spiked just over the last 2-3 weeks, so I hope you understand it will take a little bit longer for non-urgent calls to be answered at the moment. Remember that you can find information on how to solve the most common queries on the IT Help Desk pages on RGyoU so please look there first:

You can also find information on the IT Services pages on the main University web site.

Digital Curation

Unless you are devoid of any sense of wonder, you should marvel at the news that Voyager 1 has now officially left the solar system and has reached interstellar space. On the off chance that this fragile craft may one day be retrieved intact by intelligent life forms, NASA placed a “golden record” on board. This record includes samples of music, bird song, whale sounds, greetings in many languages, black and white and colour images of human society, our planet and the solar system.

They did not, however, include a record player in the spacecraft to playback this disk, and anyway that would only have helped for the sound tracks and would have relied on the unlikely possibility that alien life also uses a mains electricity supply of 120V 60 Hz with a type A electrical plug.

They did helpfully provide a stylus to get any alien started and a comprehensive set of instructions. This Wikipedia article explains how the instructions are meant to be understood, and you can look at / listen to some of the material here .

All this nicely illustrates one of the key challenges of digital curation – with our world being so dependent on digital material today, how can we preserve important digital assets and ensure that they will be accessible in the future? This is potentially a massive challenge for society and in the UK, the Digital Curation Centre has been established as a centre of expertise – a look at their web site illustrates the breadth of the challenge.

Of course, it’s not just long term digital curation that presents access challenges – ensuring at a basic level that file formats we publish are accessible across the exploding range of electronic devices is important. One great format is good old PDF – and given that the initials stand for “Portable Document Format” this should not be a surprise. Put a document into PDF format, and it is immediately accessible on Windows, Mac’s, Linux, IOS devices, Android and any web browser. Anyone using an iPad or similar is likely to have discovered a whole range of “apps” that also allow you to annotate PDF documents with comments, ink and even audio. On campus at RGU, Adobe PDF is available as standard on University PC’s and will allow PDF documents to be created and annotated.

Even better, although PDF was originally a proprietary format launched in 1993, it is now an open standard governed by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). It’s history spans 20 years so far – I can’t actually lay my hands on an original PDF version 1.0 document, but I’m sure if I could it would still be accessible with today’s PDF readers.

PDF of course does not cover all digital formats, but we should use it wherever possible in published material and documents to be stored long term. That may merit some policies and further guidance, but you don’t need to wait for that!

Of course, there’s also something ironic about a 1970’s spacecraft carrying an almost obsolete recording format into interstellar space. I have no idea how they would have put a PDF file onto Voyager 1 if PDF had been around at the time, never mind how to instruct an alien in its use.

Where goes the PC?

It’s now hard to read technology news without some mention of the decline of the PC – which is usually taken to mean Microsoft Windows based platforms. The latest one from Gartner indicates that global PC sales have fallen for the fifth quarter in a row, making it the “longest duration of decline” in history – down from 90 million units per quarter in late 2009, to 76 million units in the latest survey. The report is summarised on the BBC web site which includes a chart showing the spectacular rise in sales of tablet computers (iPad’s and similar) – widely agreed to be the main cause of the decline in PC sales.

It’s not just the Microsoft world – although Apple has bucked the trend, things seem to be catching up with them too .

What’s going on here, and what does this mean for future computing devices at RGU? Two things – (1) the PC format is not going to disappear suddenly tomorrow, but (2) the tablet format is definitely here to stay.

Let’s take the PC first. For years, most of the innovation was around the PC format and people faithfully upgraded their (perfectly good) PC’s every 3 to 5 years to get the latest technology and software. Now the innovation is in the tablet and smartphone space. People are still using PC’s where they need more power or sophistication in the software, but the PC they have is “good enough” for now, and instead of upgrading their PC many feel there is greater value in buying a tablet. I don’t know anyone who has actually thrown out their PC and replaced it completely with a tablet. A decline in sales does not necessarily mean a decline in use of the same magnitude at this stage and there is a whole world of software and services built around the PC platform that remains essential to everyday work life. It’s a bit like at the start of the recent economic recession – sales of new cars plummeted. People were still driving like before, it’s just that for a while they didn’t buy new cars.

What about tablets? Tablets bring a new world of opportunity in terms of their mobility, “instant on”, ease of use and long battery life to name but a few. Software similar to that available on PC platforms is available at a fraction of the price. As the power of tablets increases, they will progressively start to encroach on the functions carried out by PC’s – although the pace at which this happens will be interesting, as PC’s will grow in power as well. Have a look at the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” for some great insight as to what might happen here based on previous technology shifts.

Our overall strategy is to sustain the existing, mission critical, PC based environment and software, but position it, and our future services, to be available on a wider range of devices {see MyApps post}. At the same time, we want to start exploring new opportunities brought about by tablets as these become a greater part of the device portfolio used by staff and students.

What about Windows 8? That’s almost worth a post in its own right. There are many views expressed online, but it seems the general consensus is that Windows 8 is not a great user experience for mainstream PC use – unless perhaps you have a touch screen. Touch seems to work better on mobile devices, but for vertically mounted touch screens there are concerns about its ease of use and “gorilla arm”. And then there’s the start button, or not . . .

Remember that the Windows platform is still mission critical to organisations, 76 million shipments per quarter is still huge, and the traditional Windows 7 user interface with mouse and keyboard is still the most effective interface for everyday tasks. If Microsoft are trying to take a leaf out of Apple’s book by creating a closer integration between their Surface tablet, and the desktop – they should remember that Apple didn’t bring wholesale change to their OSX platform to achieve this when they brought out the iPad.

Moving to Windows 8 will not be a simple transition and will require significant training across the organisation in comparison with previous versions. Right at the moment, therefore, we’re not rushing to rollout Windows 8 across our desktop at RGU and will focus on Windows 7 and removing the remaining areas of XP. However, we can’t stay on Windows 7 for ever, so we will watch carefully how the Windows platform develops further and how people in general start to become more at home with the later versions.

Interesting to hear the news about Steve Ballmer and it’s effect on the Microsoft share price. . .