[547] in Resnet-Forum
Re: Living in the dorm, or out???
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roy Smith)
Wed Mar 8 09:44:27 1995
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 1995 09:31:54 -0500
To: Pattie Orr <PORR@wellesley.edu>
From: roy@mchip00.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Cc: resnet-forum@MIT.EDU
>I'd like to comment on the idea of whether the RCCs should live in the dorm
>they support or out.
Here any NYU Med Center, we just got our first dorm wired up this year with
plans for a second hopefully to be ready by September. In other words,
we're pretty new to this.
We're perhaps a bit different than some schools in that the mix of people
living in our dorms does not include any Computer Science majors who might
make likely candidates for resident network types. Our residential
population is made up of medical students and graduate students in
biological sciences. But we managed to identify two people (both first
year med students, I believe) who were somewhat of the computer bent and
hired them to be our "network consultants in residence". They don't have
the skills of a professional network support person, but for most things
they don't need to. They do a lot of helping people plug things in,
install software, etc. They've already put together a package of
"freeware" TCP/IP stacks and applications for DOS/Windows machines which
has exceeded what our MIS department has been able to do :-)
The other thing they do is act as a point of contact (some might say a
buffer) between the students living in the dorm and the MIS department, who
handles the actual activation of ports, assigning of IP numbers, etc.
In short, I think it would be foolish for anyplace to consider setting up a
residential networking installation without some kind of in-house
(in-dorm?) staff to help out.
----
Roy Smith <roy@nyu.edu>
Hippocrates Project, Department of Microbiology, Coles 202
NYU School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
"This never happened to Bart Simpson."
