Network Facility

Facility Staff

Lloyd Williams, PhD

Director

Office: 68th Street Campus, North Building, Room 826B
Phone: (212) 650-3872
Email: williams@genectr.hunter.cuny.edu

About

The Network Facility was established in 1990 to provide an enhanced electronic infrastructure, and trained staff, to the researchers of the Gene Center. The facility is spread over 4 floors of the north building of Hunter College. Essentially each floor is a subnet of the network with an additional subnet to host wireless clients. Data centers equipped with rack-mounted servers are located on the 9th and 3rd floors. Additional servers are located in the Bio-Imaging Facility on the 8th floor to provide domain services and data storage to that subnet.

On the 1st floor the Network Facility has an additional network device (Aruba Box) to host wireless clients and to provide authenticate network access, and VPN services. From its beginning of a single NovellTM mail/file server and, then state of the art, coaxial cabling, the network has grown to a complex facility with approximately 15 servers. This runs over a vastly expanded fiber optic/copper/wireless network that can host at any one time upwards of 500 connections.

Facility Instruments and Equipment

The Gene Center’s network is a structure of more than 14 servers in an MS Windows 2003 Active Directory forest.

Some of our servers include:

Email Servers: email systems and accounts; user authentication is required to access this site. https://gcmail.hunter.cuny.edu
Biology Web-Server: Biology Departmental website host.
Project/SharePoint Server: data collaboration platform that provides submission and record-keeping of tasks, meeting, and announcements for Network Facility staff and the Gene Center; user authentication is required to access this site. https://interoffice.hunter.cuny.edu/genecenter
Storage Server: a server with over 4Terra Bytes of drive space available to researchers for data storage and for backing the most important server in the Center, e.g. email server, Footprints server.
JustGarciaHill.org Web-Server: a virtual site for minority researchers.

Rules of Operation

All systems within the network should be up to date with patches and anti-virus protection.

All faculty, staff, and students are permitted to use any available equipment and to download work-related information and files while using the equipment.

Request for Technical Services
All requests for technical services should be submitted through Footprints, the online help-desk. Footprints can be accessed by visiting the following URL: http://footprints.hunter.cuny.edu/

Activities Not Allowed

Downloading and/or using illegal software
Downloading and/or playing games
Downloading of music (Vuze, Bit Torrent, etc.)
Accessing inappropriate material over the Internet
Inappropriate Web-Hosting

Facility Service Policy

The Gene Center Local Area Network (LAN) provides access to the vast store of information on the Internet and wide-area connection. Furthermore, it provides easy access to databases of literature citations, bioinformatics, nucleotide sequences, protein sequences, protein structures, and electronic journals.

On the local level, the LAN provides easy access to the email system, which enables timely announcements of scheduled meetings, reminders, and tasks. The LAN facilitates collaborative writing of grant proposals, papers and books and it is increasingly used for instructional technology and bioinformatics. It also facilitates frequent communication among mentors and mentees through our Internet2 Videoconferencing Facility when personal meetings are not practical. We keep users up-to-date with the latest operating systems and technology.