Wed 7 Apr 2004
Esa Seegulam ‘06 discovers the upside to Williams’s seemingly endless network problems.
On the bright side, I have also become slightly more inventive. I have started carving my lab reports onto stone tablets, which are hardly ever offline, and “worms” just pass them by without even looking twice. They can be accessed from anywhere on campus, and do not pick up viruses when you take them home for two weeks. The down side is that to protect my intellectual property, I had to write the lab in hieroglyphs, and my professor was not too pleased:(
One of our anonymous sources has commented in the past that the Chief Technology Officer at Williams just happens to be Dinny Taylor, wife of Professor Mark Taylor. On one hand, I think it is good for the College to hire as many qualified spouses as possible. On the other hand, I have yet to hear anyone say anything nice about the current state of technology at Williams. If Dinny Taylor isn’t responsible, and accountable, for this sorry state of affairs, I would like to know who is.
If the College just needs $250,000 or so of additional money to purchase the necessary equipment, or hire the right consultants, then I have an idea about where the money might come from.
April 7th, 2004 at 7:43 pm
Not to quibble but I believe it’s “Dinny” not “Ginny” as you can see here http://cf.williams.edu/oit/about/staff.cfm
Sadly, clicking on “Profile” perhaps furthers your argument.
April 7th, 2004 at 11:13 pm
Name is fixed. Thanks. Strangely enough, the profile button does not work for me.
Just to be clear, I am not making a specific “argument” above. It could be that Dinny Taylor is the best CTO in America. It could be that she is the worst. I have no way of knowing, but am always curious to hear other opinions.
As a side note, I was amazed at the number of people working in her office.
April 7th, 2004 at 11:20 pm
Oh! Your point was that clicking on the profile button does not work.
I get it now.
April 8th, 2004 at 12:27 am
Goodness, I remember mail and internet-connection problems from my frosh year, back in 1996. They’re still around?!
But there are a lot of good things one can say about Williams IT. Perhaps the school’s best technological luxuries run so smoothly that we take them for granted.
I spent a good bit of my time at Williams thinking about information technology - as a WSO member while still a student, and working for OIT for a few years following my graduation. I’m mystified by the network troubles, though I have nothing but praise for my former colleagues’ professionalism and abilities.
I do know that Williams’ location poses particular problems for communications. Consider railroad access to Williamstown: the Hoosic Tunnel connecting the Berkshires to Boston only opened around 1880, decades late and millions of 19th-century dollars over budget. Even isolated schools like Dartmouth and Bowdoin sit on major transport corridors - I-91 and I-95. They can tap into existing network backbones.
Williams has, well, Rt. 2. During my last few years at Williams, the school installed a new network connection. Fibre-optics run over the mountains to Greenfield. The final few miles are a microwave link from Florida Mountain down to a dish on Bronfman roof. This is a perfectly crazy thing to have to do in order to get a fat pipe.
A few months after the new connection went up, it stayed down for a few days because severe weather on Florida Mountain damaged the tower, and repair crews couldn’t risk the high winds.
(By the way, Mr. Kane might be interested to know that Williams provides network connectivity to the Clark Art Institute and to the Williamstown Elementary School, through wireless links.)
But enough of the bad parts. What’s good about IT at Williams includes:
* Consider the scope of OIT’s responsibilities - everything from running a network to figuring out how to make computers work with scanning electronc microscopes. There are about half a dozen departmental technicians at Williams; nearly all technological support falls to OIT.
* Williams provides a few dozen software applications, not just basic word-processing programs but also specialized and expensive tools, for use by students on campus. I don’t know of any other school that does this.
* Williams provides some level of support for something like 50-100 applications, including specialized discipline-specific applications.
* OIT funds and supports quite a bit of exotic equipment for faculty teaching and research.
* The school’s support for classroom presentation is on par with a major university’s, not only in quality and capabilities, but in the absolute number of electronic classrooms.
* Williams has high number of public computers. The major labs get upgraded every two years, rather more often than labs at most schools. The labs also have a remarkable reliability record, and the lab manager, who runs some hundreds of machines across campus by himself, is a miracle worker.
* All faculty members are entitled to computers - usually replaced every three years.
* Most facutly, staff, and students depend heavily on computers and are fairly comfortable with them. OIT staff can claim some responsibility for fostering this sort of campus culture. They’re open, competent, and friendly people - and that counts for a lot.
My view’s biased toward multimedia and technology-and-teaching. I’m sure that someone who knew more about the networks, day-to-day technology support, and administrative systems could praise them too.
I am now a grad student at the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the leading schools of its kind. But RISD’s “Advanced Media Center” looks just like a normal Williams lab. My studio’s presentation space has cords dangling down the middle of the table. And we can forget about support for applications.
Sure, our network connection, provided by Brown University, works great. But I’m spending most of my time wishing for a whit of the facilities and support we had at Williams.
April 8th, 2004 at 9:44 am
The quality of the network connection has little to nothing to do with the CTO. The best/worst way he/she (she in this case) could have an impact is by budget management - but even then, they are likely limited in what they are given.
That said, when I was there our connection to the outside world, as well as internally was totally fine.
So what has changed in those years?
Would the lines have deteriorated? Not in only 5-10 years. (especially not the interior since much of the interior network is fiber optic)
I would imagine that the real issue is more due to a combination of modern circumstances and also to the issue that David Ramos referred to.
The network connections that come in are limited to what is available to them. I don’t know what is available to them - but if something has changed there, perhaps that is the issue (that said, in the U.S. the connections usually get faster, cheaper, and more prevalent over time - so I’m not sure this is the issue).
More likely at fault is the spread and speed of computing usage and power these days.
When I was on campus, probably “most” all of the students had computers in their rooms (say 1500 of the 2000). Now I would imagine the figure is much closer to “all” (a full 2000).
All of the profs have computers in their offices and very likely have a setup at home as well.
There are the computer labs and dumb terminals around campus as well (I seriously doubt the dumb terminals are causing any network headaches due to a seriously low bandwidth requirement on their part).
There are far more other people on “the net” outside of Williams in the past few years as well.
Computers are much faster now - you can have a desktop in your room that is faster than the various servers that they had in Jesup when I was there (bigbird, colrain, and some Greek named file sharing system that caused quite a stir due to a student in David Ramos’ year that was Greek and took offense to the naming - although that machine was a quad processor, it was still likely slower than some current student desktops).
People at home (around the world, not just at Williams) have faster connections now - in my day it was a rarity to have a cable modem at home - now it is much more prevalent.
So adding all of that up, you now have many more people on “the net”, they have faster machines, and they are connected over faster connections.
That means that more people are available to hammer at sites and exchange more data.
Also, my day was just prior to a program called “Napster” which then spawned off the current P2P prevalence that we have today.
How does all of this hurt the Williams net connection?
Many ways.
1) File sharing. If even just a few students have P2P setup with even as little as 1GB of data shared out each, that can seriously flood a network connection - even a large one like at Williams.
2) File serving. If even just a few students have servers setup on their machines (FTP, web, etc), then depending on the size and popularity of the content being served, that can eat up bandwidth.
3) Spam. Spam takes up a phenomenal amount of resources. Just because you only see 4 spam e-mails a day and you delete them doesn’t mean that someone else on the network that has had the same e-mail address for longer and is net exposed doesn’t get much more than that. Spam tends to have more text and/or attachments than regular mail, and there is the sheer volume of it.
Not to mention the flooding of mail servers in general - they can send mail to accounts that don’t exist (marMARFFFST5666@williams.edu) and it still has to travel the bandwidth to get to the mailserver and then be rejected. There is a phenomenal amount of that going on that you don’t even see (I am an admin in an office of only 16 people and we get over 1000 spam e-mails a day).
4) User-sent e-mail. People send a lot more e-mail these days. They also (stupidly) send attachments in e-mail. SMTP (the e-mail service) is one of the highest priorities on a network and therefore will get moved ahead of other data.
4) This is the big one - viruses, worms, trojans. These can now spread via e-mail, Windows security holes, and via P2P (already established as a problem in other ways). These move so quickly that they can flood a system well before fixes are out and ready to block them.
That said, on a network as large as Williams (which is actually a series of smaller networks contained inside the Williams domain), you have many (MANY) users that either don’t care or just don’t know and they keep getting viruses and perhaps don’t even know/care that they have them.
Network issues are frustrating to users because one second they work, and the next they don’t. Conceptually they just see it as “I plug my computer into this jack (or wireless connection) and then I can do stuff” - and if that fails, they see a simple break in protocol - “it is plugged in, why is it not working? it should!”
There are so many things that can (and do) go wrong on a network that size, I do not envy anyone on that IT staff.
Usually the answer to fixing these issues is to throw money at it - but if the network connection at Williams is already maxed out for what is available to them, then it is hard to say if even money would help.
The number one thing that could help the network would be educated users that actually know and care about what they are doing.
Users that grasp that doing XYZ is retarded and leads to ruining the connection for everyone else.
Even when dealing with a smart group like Williams students, the overwhelming power of nature’s ability to provide always dumber users will always prevail over any IT staff and any amount of money thrown at it.
My first reaction is to tell the users at Williams to suck it up you bunch of pussies. My network connection here is a 128kbps connection shared by 20+ computers.
That is like 2 maxed out dial-up modem connections. That sucks enough on one machine and I have a whole company on it.
:)