GCU Networking Unit
GCU Networking Unit is part of GC University which is responsible for IT services for the University. It is equipped with high end servers, network devices and dedicated professionals to serve the university with the best resources.
Services
Following Services are being offered by the Networking Unit:
Email Addresses
GCU Networking Unit is providing and regulating mailing services for all staff members, faculty members and students of the University through state of the art mailing system
Internet Connectivity
Networking Unit is responsible for the provision and smooth operation of internet services at main GCU campus as well as at center for advanced studies in physics (CASP), school of mathematical sciences (SMS) and New Hostel which are interconnected with the University main campus through Wireless Links.
Department Web Space
GC IT unit is also providing web space for department's website. Using this facility any department can host their website at the University servers. Which can be accessed anywhere from the world through internet.
FTP Accounts
GC Networking unit is providing Ftp accounts so that user can access their data anywhere while connected to internet.
“The University is going in a big way to modernize the new infrastructure of the computer centre”.
Operating System:
As the University is going in a big way to modernize the new infrastructure of the computer centre and providing the smooth operation of internet services to their various department and get it completely under their control they used the operating system which are as follows:
- Windows 98
- Windows XP professional
- Windows NT
- Mac OS X Server
- Linux
Servers:
Following main servers using by GC IT unit used are as follows:
Mail server
They used the mail server for providing the mailing facility to their users like their staff, members and students.
When you send an e-mail message, your e-mail program, such as Outlook, forwards the message to your mail server, which in turn forwards it to mail server or to a holding area on the same server called a message store to be forwarded later. As a rule, the system uses SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) for sending e-mail or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) for receiving e-mail.
FTP Server:
They used the FTP server in order to make the user to access their data anywhere while using the internet. So this server is used to handle the FTP account. The major objectives of FTP server are to promote sharing of files, encourage indirect or implicit use of remote computers, shield a user from variations in file storage systems among different hosts, transfer data reliably, and efficiently.
FTP is a file transfer protocol for exchanging and manipulating files over a TCP computer network. An FTP client may connect to an FTP server to manipulate files on that server. The typical information needed to connect to an FTP site or using the FTP account is:
The server address is the network address of the computer you wish to connect to. The username and password. These are the credentials you use to access the specific files on the computer you wish to connect.
Web hosting server:
For providing the free facility to their department to launch the host website at the university server the GC IT unit uses the Mac OS X Server for this purpose. But sometimes they will use the Linux OS or the Apache Web server management for this purpose. The scope of hosting services varies widely. The most basic is web page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a Web interface. The files are usually delivered to the Web "as is" or with little processing. However GC IT unit offer this service free to their subscribers.
Proxy server:
“Schematic representation of a proxy server, where the computer in the middle acts as the proxy server between the other two”.
The GC IT unit uses the proxy server for providing the internet facilities to their students and staff. A proxy server is a server that services the requests of its clients by forwarding requests to other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource, available from a different server. The proxy server provides the resource by connecting to the specified server and requesting the service on behalf of the client. A proxy server may optionally alter the client's request or the server's response, and sometimes it may serve the request without contacting the specified server. In this case, it would 'cache' the first request to the remote server, so it could save the information for later, and make everything as fast as possible.
A caching proxy server accelerates service requests by retrieving content saved from a previous request made by the same client or even other clients. A proxy that focuses on WWW traffic is called a "web proxy". The most common use of a web proxy is to serve as a web cache. An intercepting proxy combines a proxy server with a gateway. Connections made by client browsers through the gateway are redirected through the proxy without client-side configuration.
Print server:
For providing the printing facilities to the students they have a separate printer in each lab. They have more than 3 labs. Fro managing it they use the print server facility if Microsoft XP. A print server, or printer server, is a computer or device that is connected to one or more printers and to client computers over a network, and can accept print jobs from the computers and send the jobs to the appropriate printers.
Web server:
GC IT department providing the internet connectivity to users by web server. It is a computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients, and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which usually are web pages such as HTML documents and linked objects (images, etc.).
HTTP is a request/response standard between a client and a server. A client is the end-user, the server is the web site. The client making a HTTP request—using a web browser, spider, or other end-user tool—is referred to as the user agent. The responding server—which stores or creates resources such as HTML files and images—is called the origin server. In between the user agent and origin server may be several intermediaries, such as proxies, gateways, and tunnels.
Some of the web server features they used are Authentication, optional authorization request of user name and password before allowing access to some or all kind of resources. Large file support to be able to serve files whose size is greater than 2 GB on 32 bit OS. Bandwidth throttling to limit the speed of responses in order to not saturate the network and to be able to serve more clients. Logging: usually web servers have also the capability of logging some detailed information, about client requests and server responses, to log files; this allows the webmaster to collect statistics by running log analyzers on these files.
IAS server:
GC IT unit use IAS server for the internet authentication service. . IAS is the Microsoft implementation of a Remote Authentication Dial-in User Service (RADIUS) server and proxy that enables centralized management of user authentication, authorization, and accounting. IAS can be used to authenticate users in databases.
ISA server:
In order to secure their networks from any harmful damage from hackers and crackers and also for own their system security they use the internet security accelerator server for this purpose. This provide the facility to the GC IT unit administrator to create policies for regulating usage based on user, group, application, destination, schedule, and content type criteria.
