The summer vacation has now started, and during this period only we can provide ResNet to students from other universities staying in Bristol accommodation over the summer. There is a charge of £20 for this for any period from 30th June to 22nd September.

NB: Unfortunately we can't provide ResNet to holidaymakers or other people with no educational status.

To get ResNet, see ResNet over the summer for details and an application form.

The ResNet service is 10 years old this term!

We think Bristol was the first University in the UK to provide Internet access to study-bedrooms in all halls. ResNet started as a small pilot in one block of Hiatt Baker Hall in the spring term 1998. Over the summer vacation a team of university staff and students installed hardware, wrote the docs, set up the servers, designed a logo, stuffed envelopes and did everything else so that ResNet went live across all nine halls of residence for Freshers Week, 1998. The student houses followed soon afterwards. We haven't looked back since!

10 years ago things were very different:

• Only about 30% of students had a computer, and most of those were desktops with Windows 95, or even Windows 3.1
• Fast, always on Internet like ResNet was almost unheard of - at home people had dialup if they had Internet access at all
• Computers didn't have a network adapter built-in: you had to open the case and fit a special ethernet adapter.

We are very proud of ResNet. It's been great fun working on something that provides a real service to students and people seem to appreciate (even the Epigrump column likes ResNet )

If you'd like to wish ResNet a happy anniversary, say what you think about the service, or suggest what you would like to see from ResNet in future, please leave a comment below. Here's to the next ten years!

The ResNet team.

This is the first part of a news story from the BBC.  Full story on the link at the bottom.

Severed cables disrupt Internet

Internet services have been disrupted in large parts of the Middle East and India following damage to two undersea cables in the Mediterranean.

There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption.

UK firms such as British Airways have told the BBC that call centres have been affected by the outage.

Industry experts said it could take up to one week to repair the damaged cables and resume full service.

International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem.

Full story...

If you've looked at MyResNet recently you'll have noticed that the off-peak weekly allowance cell in the Network Usage table has changed from 'unlimited' to 35GB. Currently we are not automatically restricting users based on their off-peak usage but we are working towards this goal.

Looking at this table you should be able to work out that if either the off-peak allowance OR the on-peak allowance exceed 100% AUP then your connection will be moved into the restricted network. Clever usage will allow up to 40GB weekly traffic (35 off + 5 on).

As I said before, the off-peak allowance is not active yet, but will be in the near future. The on-peak allowance is still in operation as it has been all year.

From current usage statistics, we anticipate that less than 1% of our users will be affected by this change. For example, last week 0.56% of users transferred data in excess of 35GB off peak and the week before it was just 0.33% (although term only started on Wednesday of that week).

Currently off-peak is midnight to 6pm (18 hours) and on-peak is 6pm to midnight (6 hours).

As always, we welcome constructive feedback.

Dear ResNet subscriber,

This is one in the occasional series of ResNet newsletters sent to all subscribers.

Get your computer up to date

Welcome back to Bristol if you've been away for the Christmas vacation. Now you are back this is a great time to check your computer has all the essential security updates for Windows. To check and install updates go to Microsoft Update http://www.update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate/ or open Control Panel, Security Center.

It is essential you stay up to date: if not you put your computer and others on ResNet at risk. To protect other people we may suspend your ResNet connection if your computer is not up to date (but we'd give you a warning about that first).

For more advice on computer security see Protect your computer, your data, and yourself: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/is/computing/advice/security/

Changes to fair usage allowance

During the vacation we temporarily increased the weekly peak time fair usage allowance from 5GB to 10GB, as the network was very quiet. Now term has started again we've returned to our normal limit of 5GB a week, peak time (6pm-12 midnight).

Extended ResNet Help Desk opening hours

As it's busy at the start of term we've extended the ResNet Help Desk opening hours. For the next two weeks if you need help with ResNet you can now ring us on 89001 internal, 2pm-8pm weekdays.

Free software for students

As a student at Bristol there is lots of free or very cheap software available for you. For example you can:

• Download McAfee Anti-Virus from the University free of charge,
• Buy, rent or get free (some departments only) student copies of Microsoft Office,
• Get free Desktop Publishing software from Serif,
• Get free Autodesk CAD software.

To download free software or find out more about student discounts see software for home users: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/is/computing/advice/homeusers/software/

Well it's Christmas and lots of students have disappeared for the holidays so it’s only fair that we increase the usual 5GB weekly peak-time usage to 10GB.

Peak-time is unchanged, 6pm to midnight.

The limit will be reduced back to 5GB per week from Monday 7^th January 2008 so try not to get caught out

Mark

ResNet will be ten years old in 2008! It all started with a small pilot at Hiatt Baker in the spring term 1998.

To celebrate the ten years we are planning a reunion event and trying to get in touch with everyone who has worked for ResNet over the years. If you will be anywhere near Bristol at the end of February we hope you can join us. If you can't we'd still love to hear from you and find out what you're up to.

Please get in touch by emailing resnet-help@bristol.ac.uk and we'll send you an invitation.

cheers,

Nick.

We have had quite a few reports that some / all sites in China are running really slowly or not at all.

This is not a ResNet, University, JaNet or UK problem.

Above (click to make bigger) is a graph of latency (ms) and packet loss (colour) to jupiter.sina.com.cn we are currently seeing a 550ms ping time and 95% packet loss. This is not good. The packet loss is generally happening in the link between USA and China - and obviously we have no control over that!

This page will be updated when we have more info.

Update Tuesday @ 8am

Below is the new latency graph. It shows that there are still problems, again totally out of our control - sorry.

Update Thrusday @ 11am

It seems that the packet loss today has dropped below 25% which is much better than the 95% we have been seeing. Sites are loading much more reliably now

We're pleased to announce that we've upgraded My ResNet to a newer, faster, prettier version!

The main improvements that you'll notice are:

• A new look and feel
• The main page loads much faster than it did previously
• "Check my network usage" is now much easier to understand than it was previously, and has interactive graphs!

If you notice anything that's not working quite how you would expect it to, or have any comments about the new version (good or bad!) please get in touch. If it's broken we want to fix it!

We have more improvements planned for My ResNet, but what we'd really like is some ideas from you, so if you've got any ideas let us know! some things you might want to think about include:

• What information would you like which is currently missing?
• What do you currently have to phone the helpdesk about, which we could make easier for you by giving you tools to do it for yourself?

-Paul

Update: To save you the trouble of having to email us your feedback, we're opening up the comments on this one! Let us know what you think of the new My ResNet using the form below...

Update 2008-03-25: Comments are now closed on this post, as the spammers have noticed it. Please email us your comments instead.

Freewire TV

Frewire TV provides multi channel digital TV over ResNet to your computer. If you want to try Freewire TV, please:

• Turn on the TV signal to your room using My ResNet
• Download the Freewire application from the Freewire website

If you receive a message that 'channels are off air' on all channels then make sure that Freewire is available in your residence and you have switched on the TV signal with My ResNet.

Problems with the ResNet security checker on some Windows systems

The ResNet security checker seccheck.exe does not run correctly on Windows XP 64-bit edition and some, but not all, non-English language versions of Windows. In particular we have seen problems with Hungarian and Polish versions of Windows, but there may be others.

We'd like to fix these problems and are working on it, but it is tricky as we don't have access to all the foreign language Windows versions. In the meantime, please see ResNet knowledgebase article 23 for some instructions to do it manually.

If you need help, please phone the ResNet Help Desk on 89001 from your room. It is now much easier to get through than it was earlier in the week.