Subject: Morewood-E & Shady Oak Packet Shaper Testing
   Date: Tue 8/27/2002 5:20 PM
   From: Housing <univhous@andrew.cmu.edu>
     To: All-Residents@wgs.housing.cmu.edu <All-Residents@wgs.housing.cmu.edu>


The following announcement is made by Computing Services.

Beginning Tuesday, August 27, 2002, the Computing Services Network Group
will be testing two network traffic engineering products in two residence
hall buildings: Morewood E-Tower and Shady Oaks apartments.

The purpose of this testing is to evaluate the performance of these
so-called "packet shapers". Packet shapers give network administrators
greater control over the movement of network traffic. The net visible
result to users in a successful implementation would be an increase in the
perceived network bandwidth.

Each year, the demand for Internet bandwidth rises while the per-megabit
cost to the University remains constant or decreases slightly. In order to
continue providing the campus with fast Internet connections while
maintaining costs, Computing Services is evaluating these packet shaper
products.

The affected residence hall buildings will be Morewood E-Tower and the
Shady Oaks apartments. At 6:00am Tuesday morning, there will be a brief
network outage to each building as the packet shaping products are
installed. The actual outage should be less than 5 minutes for each
building.

During the testing phase, we do not anticipate any outage in on-campus or
Internet connectivity for these buildings. Due to the high speed of the
on-campus backbone, no packet shaping will be applied to these connections.
Therefore, browsing on-campus websites, reading Cyrus email, and other
on-campus network traffic will not be affected.

If users experience any extended problem using their network, they should
contact the Computing Services Help Center (advisor@andrew.cmu.edu,
268-HELP, or the Cyert Hall A-Level). If a problem is noticed after-hours,
please contact Computer Operations at x8-6688.





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