IT Home I July 9, 2008->->
Accomplished Projects 2007-08
Information Technology Department
Perhaps the most time sensitive and exciting project we undertook this past year was the installation of a broadband satellite system onboard the Training Ship Golden Bear. In December 2007, we did not have any contracts or consultants in place. Nevertheless, when the ship departed campus at the end of April to cruise the Pacific Ocean for four months, everything needed to be in place and working. It was a race against time and a project that most sane people would have refused to undertake given the circumstances!
Between January and the end of April, the ship’s network was redesigned and $121,000 worth of switches were installed and configured. A contact was signed with Vizada and new satellite antennae was shipped from Norway. With the aid of a helicopter, the 12’ diameter, 1800 pound antenna was installed directly above the bridge of the ship.
Equally daunting was the challenge of getting the ship to be recognized as a site off our network (so that the switches did not need to be reconfigured) and getting the Exchange servers on the ship and campus to communicate through the limited bandwidth provided by the satellite broadband system.
Complicating the matter, the 300 email accounts on the ship needed to be migrated back to campus while another 300 accounts were migrated to the ship while it was in Honolulu for five days this summer. Unfortunately, the satellite bandwidth was not sufficient to accommodate this and it proved to be far too expensive to temporarily increase the bandwidth… so alternate secure and reliable methods needed to be developed and tested.
Students and faculty also benefited from improved telephone communications. Four outgoing lines were now available to students (whereas in the past there were only two). Students no longer had to wait in line in the hallway for their turn, either. During this summer’s cruise, students could place calls from the privacy of their cabins.
There were glitches along the way (hardware failures, etc.). Despite these, most would agree that ship to shore communication was a thousand times better than the past couple of years. The TSGB went without email communications for several weeks during the 2007 cruise.