"We're connected to 86 buildings, with 250 systems, containing more than 13,000 ports." All Mitch Davis can do is smile as he gazes at walls of wires and computers in the basement of Hubbard. "No matter where you plug in, it all comes here," he says.
According to Davis, Bowdoin's Chief Information Officer, the College's computer network is a vast and powerful machine. This semester, the whole system is about to get even better.
"We had a contract with an internet provider for several years. Now that contract is up," Davis said. What that means for Bowdoin students is better and more reliable internet. "What we were working with before was a 30 megabit connection. Now we're getting a 125 megabit connection."
In addition, Bowdoin's revamped internet connection is more secure as well. According to Network Engineer Jason Lavoie, the College's current connection is not up to par.
"We have one connection coming in. If this cable is broken, the whole internet goes down," he said.
Now Bowdoin has two path-diverse connections to two different providers. The paths will not cross, so if one connection gets broken, the system still works.
The upgrades will not burden the College financially. "We used to pay $10,500 a month, now we're getting a system that's four times faster for $9,700 a month," Davis said.
According to Davis, this system has come a long way over the past two years.
"Two years ago, we had a bad virus, the Blaster Virus. It infected the old network and every computer connected to it," Davis said. "The old network was impossible to secure. We couldn't close ports?anyone could hack in any time they wanted to."
Information Technology (IT) soon realized that changes had to be made.
"We looked at what we had and realized people were needing more. The art department was using external hard drives to transport large amounts of information. Basically, people had to work around the network," Lavoie said.
Once IT realized the flaws, everything had changed. Bowdoin upgraded to redundant gigabit processors. "The backup system is always online, so even if the network were to fail, the downtime would be under three seconds," said Lavoie.
There are two sets of firewalls now?a border firewall protecting the campus from outside networks and a core firewall to protect computers connected to the campus network from getting to the core server. IT also segregated different networks into different sections. Instead of one big "melting pot," a student segment, an administrative segment, and several others were created to control access between groups.
The past summer, another big change took place in the Bowdoin network?it went completely wireless. Many students working at IT found this process daunting.
"It's more than just taking access points out and hanging them up," said Alec Berryman '07. "You can model it, but you don't know the actual construction of the building. There was a lot of trial and error."
Changes in IT are constantly being made. "We upgrade a quarter of our machines every year," said Davis. "And we could keep going deeper and deeper?there's a lot going on here."