Campus Computing News

By Dr. Maurice Leatherbury, Senior Director of Academic Computing

UNT Joins Internet 2

On February 3, 1999, Dr. Hurley signed UNT's application for membership in the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID,) the organization that manages membership in Internet 2.  In addition, Dr. Mark Rorvig and Dr. Armin Mikler submitted an NSF Connections to the Internet grant proposal on January 29th to help fund the actual connection to an Internet 2 GigaPOP (the gigabit Point of Presence site that links to the Internet 2 network.) While it will be many months before the results of the grant competition are announced, UNT can now participate with 140 other research universities in the planning for advanced networking services that Internet 2 promises.

Internet Backbone Connection Speed Increase

Three additional T1 lines were added to UNT’s Internet link in January*, bringing the bandwidth to 7.6 Mbs (an increase of 150% over the previous two lines.) By the end of the month, bandwidth utilization was peaking at 80% of capacity so we have asked the General Services Commission to install a sixth T1 line. The increase in "commodity Internet" (the current commercial Internet) connection speed is quite noticeable to users on campus: if you experience delays in getting connected to a Web site or slowness in displaying a Web page now, you can blame the system at the other end of the connection!

Record Number of Hits Received by UNT's Central Web Server

During the month of January, UNT's central Web site (www.unt.edu) delivered a record number of files to users. The Web server had 6.15 million "hits", 56% of them requested by users from non-UNT sites.  The previous record of 3.84 million hits was set in October, 1998. Much of the increase can be attributed to the new Web site design which is more graphics-intensive than the old one, but even factoring out the graphics pages, the Web server delivered 799,000 actual Web pages (HTML files) during the month.

* See "Internet Bandwidth Upgrade" in the January 1999Benchmarks Online for further information.