Student Village – Development in Jeans and a T-Shirt

LUNA Has Landed

Nick Jackson / January 8, 2010 / LUNA

The waiting is over, the changes have been made, LUNA is here.

All users of the internet in University accommodation (Student Village and Riseholme Park) will see the new service whenever they connect to the internet. None of your details have changed, you still use the same username and password to connect, but how things look will be different. Hopefully cleaner, faster and easier to use.

The next phase of the upgrade (requiring people to have updated machines and anti-virus) is already partially in effect, all new machines being connected and those already in quarantine will need to be running recent service packs. However, as far as we are aware nobody is affected by this requirement since you’re all well behaved and have updates turned on. At the next scheduled required rescan (about two weeks away) all users will be required to be up to date and running anti-virus and anti-malware software. Sadly we don’t have a cool web address like http://getsecure.lincoln.ac.uk to give to people which talks them through what to do, so in the meantime I’ve created my own quick guide:

Nick’s Guide to Getting Secure

Read it, make sure you follow the three simple steps, and that’s it. Easy.

When Things Change…

Nick Jackson / December 21, 2009January 4, 2010 / LUNA

It’s all going to be a bit quiet between now and Christmas (Although the three lifts @mab_sheila, @mab_jane and @mht_marie have promised to keep you company), but I bring exciting news (as promised) about the big changeover date for network access in student accommodation.

On the 4th of January, how you log in to the University’s network from University accommodation will change.

OK, that’s a bit of a lie to get your attention. How you log in won’t change, it’ll only look a bit different. The mechanics of registering a new computer won’t change either (and as a Christmas present you’ll be able to register games consoles!). However, a bit in the middle will be changing significantly – you will be required to run a quick scan of your computer when it is connected to the network. This is completely non-invasive (we honestly don’t care about the contents of your files, or your internet history, or your music collection) and only checks for the presence of certain required things, such as anti-virus and anti-malware software, the latest service packs, critical updates and so on.

Continue reading “When Things Change…”

The New Login

Nick Jackson / December 6, 2009 / LUNA

I’ve had a couple of people enquire as to what’s happening with LUNA and network access, specifically “will it all change”. The answer is “no, it won’t all change”. To cheer some people up, here’s a shot of what the new login page looks like:

You will notice it looks different, but this is just a cosmetic change. It’s the same username, it’s the same password. We’ve just revamped the code which underpins how it looks and feels to make it easier for you to use. You might also notice the presence of a new button labelled “connect a games console”, which does exactly what you might expect. It lets you register a games console to use on the network. Finally, you might notice the addition of an orange blob next to the games console button. This is the new traffic light – it goes red if there’s something actively stopping you getting online, amber if all you need to do is log in (or something similar) without there being a known problem, and green if you’re online and everything is working perfectly.

You’ll be able to give the whole thing a proper whirl next week when we present the demo to various people and start letting you have a play before it actually goes live. The big switchover for the real system is currently scheduled for over the Christmas holidays sometime (as soon as we have a date and time, you’ll know), and we’re going to try time it to cause as little disruption as possible. Most people shouldn’t even notice something’s happened, but there may be a few minutes when you can’t log in followed by a few minutes of things possibly not working entirely right whilst we finish tightening the screws on the new system.

It’s coming…

Nick Jackson / September 30, 2009 / Print From My PC

Yes, it’s true. Printing from your own PCs – the #2 item on student surveys about IT for quite a while now – is just around the corner and should be open for use by Week 6 (just in time for all those lovely assignments), with a few caveats.

The University's SafeCom printers, working from my laptop. — The University's SafeCom printers, on my laptop.

Firstly, the initial offering will be ‘Windows only’. As in, Windows (XP, Vista and 7) will work properly and everything else will work after a fashion but be unsupported. This is because of a curious implementation of the protocol at Microsoft’s end which means that clients using CUPS (OS X and Linux, this is you) will print fine, but not know when printing has been done. Some systems such as Ubuntu will then helpfully try to print again, so if you don’t remember to manually clear your print queue then you’ll end up with 100 copies of those lecture slides and no credit. This is very much a work in progress, and I’m actively working on some alternatives to solve this problem. In the meantime, when this is released all OS X and Linux users make sure you follow the guides very, very carefully.

Continue reading “It’s coming…”