Engineering Computing report to CNAG December 2004

• mmlab - (See September report) Extreme Summit48si installed. Remaining two Cisco switches for this lab are still gigastacked which is fine since gigastack between 2 switches is 1000/full (not shared media). Gigastack between 3 or more switches is 1000/half and is shared media, non qos. The lab firewall lockdown procedure will be implemented on the Summit48si instead of the Engineering core router.
• CEIT network. Support contract on core Black Diamond switch has been renewed.
• Vernier wireless authentication. A preliminary analysis of Verniers wireless authentication appliance suggested it would meet our technical requirements, and decentralized management requirements. However, in the absence of more tangible benefits, Engineering would prefer to continue to use the NAA.
• ona - watitis presentation Dec 7, 2004. Slides are here
• Video conference problems in Science - Traced to NBAR based traffic shaping at UW external router. See RT items RT87645 and RT89904 for some additional technical information. Units with H.323 video conference facilities should request that they be exempted from firewalling and traffic shaping at the external router.
• Possible Avaya access point issue with vlan trunking - The Avaya access points in Engineering are configured with vlan trunks (instructions are here) such that the management IP address is on a different subnet from the wireless clients. This had been working fine, but we have run into an odd situation. A few laptop computers don't see the access points. However, if the laptop is carried somewhere else and successfully connects, and carried back, it will then see the local access point. Converting the AP back to non trunking mode "cures" the problem. Some packet sniffing will likely be required to determine what is going on.
• NAA and traffic shaping - Traffic shaping is supported as described here
• Old Cisco 2916 switches - 2 new Summit200-24 switches have arrived which will be used to start phasing out the old non 802.1q capable Cisco 2916 switches still in service.
• Emergency contact procedure - the wheels are in motion to enhance the emergency contact procedure for Engineering Computing.