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Over the past
ten years, UNS has witnessed tremendous evolutionary advancements
resulting in improvement in the quality of service provided
for students, staff and faculty on campus and outside. Several
technologies were implemented in order to obtain a bigger
and more stable network for AUC. These technologies included
the replacement of the fully meshed ATM backbone with networked
gigabit backbone, dedicated switched 10/100 Fast Ethernet
ports to the desktop, redundant web mail servers and Increased
bandwidth to access the Internet.
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New network management practices were
also adopted such as WAN traffic shaper and Proactive Alert
System Taskforce technique (PAST). The network has also
grown bigger and more complicated. The latest additions
include the new Falaky Academic Center building network,
the Cairo Center building network, and the connection of
the staff faculty and student dorm in Zamalek residences
to the university network in addition to some satellite
flats, all completed by year 2004. In addition there has
been a huge increase in the network port density in both
the Greek, the main and Falaky campuses, and now we are
reaching 5000 active ports. Lines for remote access have
also been increased to 300 lines, with 120 lines dedicated
to ISDN service, in addition to ADSL connections through
local ISPs and management & monitoring systems were
implemented to proactively identify Dial-in problems and
enable UNS staff to improve reliability, availability and
responsiveness of the service. Videoconferencing network
infrastructure is now available as a mainstream service
for both educational and university business purposes. Wireless
services have been instituted in all open areas in the university
in addition to the university main halls.
A new network security system is now implemented
using CISCO firewalls (One on the network perimeter and
the other within the collapsed backbone switch with fail
over facility) and intrusion detection tools. Within this
system, Virtual Private Networks (VPN) is implemented to
connect AUC's main campus site via secure connection in
case of connectivity through other service providers around
the world.
A plan to migrate the current email infrastructure
featuring robust, responsive and commercial- standard email
architecture has been implemented. This new infrastructure
is deploying centralized directory service authentication
(using LDAP Protocol), which will enable the university
at a later stage to adopt collaborative work environment
for improved business processing.
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