Electrical Testing in the Division

After a long lead time, the testing of the Division’s electrical equipment has begun.

The University's electrical contractors, Gungahlin Electrical, has commenced the testing and tagging of electrical equipment in the Division. The Division has agreed to this electrical testing to demonstrate its duty of care in relation to the safety of electrical equipment used by staff and students.

Staff need to be tolerant of the needs of the contractors to test equipment, which will need to be disconnected to be tested.

The contractors are required to test all pieces of electrical equipment they find: whether the property of the University or not. Any piece of electrical equipment in the University needs to be tested, and untested or failed equipment should not be plugged in.

Two TSU staff members are to attend a CIT course this weekend that will give them the authority to do minor testing and repairs so that the operations of the Division can proceed without too much intrusion.

Network Storage for Divisional Students

Client Services Division has begun to enforce 20MByte quotas on student home drives.

Recently Client Services Division has begun to enforce quotas on student home drives. The 20MByte limit on student home drives was always specified, but not enforced until recently.

Students in the Division of Communication and Education, especially journalism, new media and ICT in education students, routinely require more than this amount of space for their work, so the enforcement of the quota has left them without sufficient network storage space.

In the short term TSU has made available space on the Division's servers on an ad hoc basis where requested. This is a manual task and quite labour intensive, and the experience the users have in accessing the space can be confusing.

In the long term the Division will need to increase the amount of storage available to those students with legitimate needs beyond those that can be satisfied with the storage made available through Client Services Division. TSU is currently engaged with an outside contractor to provide some automation to the process, so that additional space can be made available to students in nominated subjects without too much effort on our part, while there is storage space available.

Satellite Dish installation

Update on the installation of the satellite dishes on Building 20.

Installation of the satellite dishes on Building 20 has hit a bit of a snag: Facilities and Services Director Graham McDonald has informed our preferred supplier that there are a number of issues that require approval and checking before the project can go ahead.

These include approval from the Buildings and Site Committee and PALM (or its current successor organisation). As well it is necessary to check the strength of the supporting beams in line with the equipment to be installed. To ensure adequate strength it will be necessary for a Structural Engineer to be given the appropriate information to enable them to carry out the calculations.

We are trying to resolve these issues with the various parties.

Equipment loss

More loan equipment has been damaged.

There has been a significant increase in instances of loss or damage to loan equipment in the Division over the second semester. In the last two weeks, a portable computer has had its screen damaged, and one of our new Sony miniDV video cameras was damaged beyond repair before its second use.

There is still no clear indication of what has happened to the camera, but during its second loan it and the other items in the kit were discovered to be covered in corrosion. Investigations are continuing but no-one seems to be able to tell us what happened to the camera: it appears that something like mineral water was spilled into the camera case sometime before it was opened during its first loan in the new media lab on Friday, 3 October 2003. After being cleaned up and stored with still some of the liquid apparently remaining in the case until the following Wednesday, the camera and its accessories became extremely corroded.

The camera cannot be repaired and is unusable.

IT Loan 2004 Bids

The IT and Infrastructure Committee has reviewed requests for expenditure from the Division’s 2004 IT Loan Account, and has made recommendations to the Executive on priorities for expenditure.

The Divisional IT & Infrastructure Committee gave its initial assessment of bids received from the Division for expenditure from an IT Loan account for 2004. A updated list with ratings will be distributed at the Executive meeting on Friday.

Major features of the bids so far recommended by the IT & Infrastructure Committee include:

• Upgrade to the ICT in Education student lab to replace failing PCs, and to the teaching lab to allow presentations to be streamed over the Internet;
• Upgrade to the New Media Lab to bring it more into line with current technologies;
• Server Upgrades for the Division to ensure higher reliability of the Division's network services;
• Some production equipment upgrades to ensure compliance with OH&S requirements;
• Additional data projectors in some of the Division's teaching spaces; and
• A new photocopier to replace the Océ in Building 1.

IT & Infrastructure Committee will finalise a recommendation to the Executive at the Committee’s next meeting in early November.