A View from the Crease: Comments

Comment on "How Much is Too Much?"

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:50:19 -0500

While this might fall under the category of arguing about your examples instead of the principle, you are missing a piece of the security. Your example about the Secure ID token left on the monitor misses that you would still need to have physical access to use it. If there was no secure ID, then someone remote has a chance at gaining unauthorized access.

Now I tend to agree with you on password rotation, 30 days is a really short time. The trade off is if account info gets out, at most it would be valid for 30 days.

- John Schubert

Comment on "Game Change"

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:15:18 -0500

That is amazing cost savings. Looking forward to the day without having to move tapes all over the place.

- John Schubert

Comment on "Game Change"

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:54:15 -0500

@John We will be routing traffic over PennREN with the eventual goal to have most of the Penn State intercampus network traffic on PennREN. The PASSHE schools will do this too. As a member we'll pay a fee to KINBER, but the study I've seen demonstrates that it will lower our costs for maintaining a statewide network by year 2.

You are correct in thinking that this will have an effect on our disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans. One of the things my group looked into years ago was the ability to do asynchronous disk mirroring over IP networks. It works, but PennREN will give us the opportunity to do it over even greater lengths (e.g. between campuses). We are in an era where tape backup to an off-site area may be replaced by a LOCKSS philosophy (Lot Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe).

- Jim Leous

Comment on "Game Change"

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:25:17 -0500

@Jim -- Unfortunately, stuck with Comcast at this time. Your response to Chris does raise another question. Will PSU IPs be routed across this network? Is it going to replace the existing links between campuses? Makes me think about DR for all campuses then. Instead of having to buy costly space in a "city" location, why not go to one of the more rural places to put it. Or if the bandwidth is really going to be that good, have several smaller sites instead of one big DR site.

- John Schubert

Comment on "Game Change"

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:54:23 -0500

@Chris -- It's true that we can move data more quickly, but the real key is what is moved with that data. For Penn State, most of our campuses are very close to PennREN. Currently, faculty at some of our campuses and especially the College of Medicine are at a disadvantage. This new optical data network will improve telemedicine by connecting experts at Hershey, Penn, and UPMC with regional medical centers, rural hospitals, and clinics. Performance and video will occur at previously unimagined fidelity; data mining larger data sets will be possible; and movement of simulation data, genomic data, demographic data, and materials research data will allow unprecedented levels of cooperation and collaboration. On the education side, this will be a distance education enabler. It will provide higher levels of broadband access to underserved areas of the Commonwealth and most educational intermediate units (IUs) serving K12.

One of the unique features of how we'll build out PennREN is that our commercial partners will put down more fiber than we'll need. They'll use that additional fiber (about 2x what we'll get) to provide broadband access to start-ups and existing businesses in areas around the Commonwealth where there is no commercial viability for such access. This will be a game changer for many areas that would ordinarily never have broadband service.

@John -- Comcast could be part of the equation right now. We broached forming a MIX (Metropolitan Internet eXchange) with them and D&E years ago. They have opted not to join. If you have D&E, it's a much shorter path to University Park.

- Jim Leous

Comment on "Game Change"

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:23:49 -0500

This is amazing. Congrats to everyone for their hard work to get this.

A couple questions, is Comcast part of this? Would be nice if cable modems/DSL from this area didn't have to travel all over the place to get back to PSU. Failing that, any chance there will be a local company that will have broadband service connected to this?

- John Schubert

Comment on "Game Change"

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:37:56 -0500

Tell me more about how it could change everything. I can see data being more accessible more quickly, but what else?

- Christopher P. Long

Comment on "The Future of "Help!""

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:21:34 -0500

Hey Jim ... I think you are right that the future of "help" in education can't be centered only on what we build. There has to be a bigger picture to it -- so many of the people we support are using tools from across the web that really have little to do with the things we support. I think the challenge is having enough depth across ITS to support the limitless number of things available out there.

- Cole W. Camplese

Comment on "Reminder: Perseids Tonight"

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:18:48 -0500

It was pretty cloudy last night, but I saw a really good one about 2am moving from east to west about 20 degrees in the sky. Shortly after the clouds started moving in with a vengeance, so I went to bed.

- Jim Leous

Comment on "Reminder: Perseids Tonight"

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:08:52 -0500

I will look for it as I get up early to attend the Specter town hall at the Penn Stater.

- Christopher P. Long