Campus Computing News

By Dr. Maurice Leatherbury, Senior Director of Academic Computing

Internet Backbone Bandwidth Increase

The University soon will be tripling the capacity of the data communications lines that connect us to the Internet backbone, from the current two "T1" lines to six T1 lines.  A T1 line has a capacity of 1.544 million bits per second, giving us approximately nine Mbps when all six lines become operational.  The increase will relieve the current congestion on our lines and, we believe, meet our expected demand for backbone capacity for the remainder of this academic year. The additional lines should be installed and operational by the beginning of the Spring, 1999 semester.

Faster, Bigger, Better Web Servers

UNT's dependence upon our central Web services grows at an accelerating rate: we had about 6.25 million "hits" on our central Web server machine in October, compared to 1.4 million in October 1996 and 2.3 million in October 1997. In addition, UNT's faculty are developing more than 90 courses on our recently-installed WebCT* Web course management system software that runs on that same computer. To insure that this critical resource remains reliable and responsive, we've purchased two Sun Netra 450 computers each with dual 250 MHz processors, one gigabyte of memory, and 50 GB of disk capacity. One of the new machines will be devoted primarily to UNT's central Web site (www.unt.edu) while the other will run WebCT. Files on the two machines will be replicated on a regular basis throughout the day so that if one machines goes down we can quickly reconfigure the network to allow the other machine to assume both roles without losing much if any data. Both machines are backed up daily to our central UNIX tape unit.

Mark Wilcox, the central Web administrator, is in the process of configuring the computers and installing all of the requisite software to get them up and running. Our goal is to have them operational by the beginning of the spring semester. The changeover to the new machines will be transparent to users except that they'll see quicker response from UNT's central Web services.n

* For more information about WebCT®, see the article "WebCT at UNT" in this month's Benchmarks Online.