Information technology
Compared to the upheaval caused by the relocation and new installation the previous year, 2005 was a somewhat more balanced for the IT team. Since one of the IT Specialists left the team, it had to get along with less manpower for a large part of the year. On the other hand, a new IT Specialist was hired part-time at the end of the year to look after the systems of the teaching administration. The team also had two trainees during the year.
The IT team maintains a system of c. 500 workstations and 50 servers over a 1 Gbit/s Ethernet, and a LAN with 40 base stations at the department. The daily maintenance of the hardware, software and security of such a large system demands a great deal of work in itself. Keeping systems at the cutting edge of development, offering specialised solutions for teaching and research, and the use of both Linux and windows in the workstations all bring additional challenges to the work.
In the past year, development efforts have been concentrated to offering new services and on increasing the storage capacity. Important projects include the acquisition of a database server for the staff, the renewal of a group server that offers project and research groups disk space, as well as increasing its capacity, obtaining a special server dedicated to the bioinformaticians, acquiring a Windows server for users who use Windows only occasionally, and integrating it into the Linux environment, and obtaining a 64-bit multi-process server for computation that needs a great deal of memory. As for workstations, mainly laptops have been replaced this year.
The huge amount of spamming still demanded the attention of the team this year, as it has varied between 90 and 95 % of all e-mail lately. Due to effective preventive measures, the amount of spam that reaches the users has been kept at a minimum. Security threats were kept at bay with the aid of active updating, and extensive virus protection and filtering of mail viruses. Though the security remained good, attempted breaches increased significantly. As an example, in January 2005 there were only c. 60,000 attempts at cracking passwords, but by the end of the year there were 300,000 per month.