INFORMATION SERVICES
April 2006
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Announcements from the Bulletin, Today, Notification-L

04/28/06, Macalester Hires New IT Leader
Jerry Sanders of Evanston, IL, has accepted an offer to become the Associate Vice President for Information Technology Services at Macalester. In this role, he will be responsible for administrative and academic technology, and hardware and software support at the college.

Jerry's direct reports at Macalester will be David Sisk, desktop services, Ted Fines, network services, Ramón Rentas, administrative technology services, and Barron Koralesky, academic technology services. As previously announced, the Library and Media Services now report through the Provost's line.

He brings extensive experience with technology and higher education. For more than 20 years, he served in various roles of increasing responsibility at Loyola University in Chicago, a time as the Chief Information Officer.

Jerry will report to David Wheaton, Vice President for Administrative and Finance. He will join the college's staff on June 12. [Bulletin, also 5/2]

04/18/06, Find Yourself -
In the on-line directory. Go to www.macalester.edu and click on Directory. Look yourself up to be sure your information is correct. If not, please contact Human Resoruces at x6280. Also, please notice that you can look up departments and individuals - even by first name, or partially spelling a last name. Any questions? Contact Telecommunications at x6566. [Bulletin, also 4/21]

04/17/06, Saturday Internet Maintenance Results
On Saturday, 15 April 2006, at about 6:30 PM, we finished integrating the new bandwidth shaping device into our Internet connection. The new device is called a Net Equalizer, and for the duration of this 30-day evaluation period, has replaced our Packetshaper. What we are hoping to see is:

• More efficient use of our Internet connection (using it to its capacity, not over- or under-used)
• More consistent Internet speeds for everyone
• Lower latency, so that latency-sensitive programs line VoIP, streaming audio and games work better
• Better control over disruptive P2P (peer-to-peer) applications

Again, we apologize for Saturday's disruption. We are optimistic that the NetEqualizer will provide faster, more consistent Internet access for our campus. Please report any improvements or problems to Marisa Brandt (brandtm@macalester.edu) or me (Ted Fines, fines@macalester.edu).

Thank you!

Further reading...

• "Bandwidth" is, for all practical purposes, our Internet connection speed. We have a 15Mbps (Million bits per second) Internet connection. For comparison, a dial-up modem has a 56kbps (thousand bits per second), and a home cable modem, a.k.a. 'broadband' has roughly 6 Mbps.
• "Shaping" means determining how the bandwidth gets used. Examples of shaping are: A rule to always reserve 10% of the available bandwidth for web browsing. Or, a rule to give our e-mail server high priority so that accessing e-mail over the Internet would be as quick as possible.
• "Internet Connection" means everything we're talking about here relates only to access to and from Macalester from off-campus. None of this relates to on-campus access to any of Macalester's systems.

What we've been using for several years now is a device called the Packetshaper, made by Packeteer. The Packeteer sits between the Internet and Macalester, and works by analyzing every packet that goes through it. (All of your network communication is done in streams of packets, each containing a portion of the information you're sending or receiving.) The Packetshaper looks at each packet, then treats it according to rules we have defined. One actual rule we have had in place is: Make filesharing packets low priority, and limit the total bandwidth they can use to a very small percentage of the total bandwidth.

The Packeteer's design has some problems. One, it has to know about every possible packet type it might encounter (there are thousands upon thousands). Since new packet types are constantly being created, in some cases specifically to avoid detection by the Packetshaper, you have to keep updating the product. This is an arms race, just like the whole virus/anti-virus arms race. It will never end. Two, since the Packetshaper has to individually examine each packet, it will slow them down to differing degrees. Certain applications, like streaming audio or Voice-over-IP don't work well if they get slowed down too much. Three, because the product has this sophistication and complexity, it is very expensive and demands a lot of our time to manage it.

The NetEqualizer takes a completely different approach. It just employs a fairness algorithm that just prevents any one machine from hogging the available bandwidth. It doesn't analyze every packet, looking for rules on how to treat it. As such, it should have much lower latency (packet delay), and give everyone a more consistent and equitable Internet connection. We will now try it out and see if it can deliver! [Notification-L]

04/15/06, Internet Maintenance Today
We're going to be testing some new Internet equipment today starting at approximately 3:00 PM. From 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM there may be brief (a few minutes), intermittent Internet outages while we swap equipment in/out. This will not affect the campus network, such as access to the file servers, printers, Lester, CARS, etc., but only sites outside of Macalester. The outages will be a few minutes, and we will make every effort to minimize them. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause.

The purpose of today's testing is to try out a product, the NetEqualizer, which performs bandwidth management. (It prioritizes how traffic on our Internet connection gets used.) Currently, we have a product called the Packetshaper for this. Since we have had a number of protocols the Packetshaper doesn't seem to handle very well, we're looking for alternatives. We're very fortunate today to have someone involved in the development of the NetEqualizer make a visit to Macalester, so we're going to take advantage of that.

Feedback is always welcome! Please e-mail me (Ted Fines, fines@macalester.edu) back with any questions/comments. [Notification-L]

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