Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

With the CDMA network now sheduled to close on April 29th it’s time to sort out your mobile phone.

After much uncertainty, the CDMA network is now due to be discontinued on April 29th. Any staff with a UNE mobile on the CDMA network should consider changing over to the Telstra Next G network.

The Service Desk provides purchasing, account administration, international roaming and support for UNE mobile phones. For more information visit http://www.une.edu.au/it-services/staff/phone/mobilephone.php

Important Warning - be on the look out for a malicious email circulating at UNE

An email has been sent to a number of staff across campus asking users to verify their UNE account.  This email is malicious and is NOT from ITD at UNE - it is an attempt by somebody outside UNE to obtain usernames and passwords.   Please DO NOT reply to the email disclosing your details, ignore and delete the message. If you have responded to the message already, please change your password immediately by logging in to http://my.une.edu.au and selecting the “Accounts” tab.

If you have any questions, please contact the IT Service Desk on x5000.

Many thought it couldn’t be done but ITD’s recent database upgrade and the subsequent upgrade of UNE’s student information system UNESIS been so successful that other University’s are sending teams to learn more. 

When ITD announced that it was going to upgrade its database using the latest RAC technology there were many who said it couldn’t be done. But after months of hard slog, UNE proved them wrong becoming the first Australian university to successfully move to an Oracle RAC environment. 

RAC allows users to access a database through multiple, interconnected computing nodes rather than accessing one single giant computer. Multiple computing nodes communicate with each other forming a computer cluster. For users this means faster access to the entire database and at busy times or in cases of breakdown users can be directed to other available nodes.  

ITD chose to migrate off it’s current Tru64 environment (end of life 2010) onto Linux, instead of another proprietary systems, such as IBM or SUN, because Linux clusters provide an incredibly cost effective technology allowing UNE to maximise services to staff and students. 

Daniel Watkins, Database administrator explains ‘We realised that for UNE, RAC provided flexibility, protection against faults and importantly room to increase our capacity to keep pace with our needs. With this system we can just keep adding nodes.” 

In October UNE upgraded to the latest version of the Callista student information system. This involved migrating Callista onto the new RAC database. The success of this upgrade has sparked a lot of interest from other university’s IT departments. This week a team from Deakin University will visit UNE to find out how it was achieved with a team from Monash expected later this month.