February 22, 2006
D R A F T
John Ross, Academic Affairs IT Coordinator

Planning for the Border Firewall Changes in Academic Affairs

Assessment

Within the colleges and components of Academic Affairs we must identify 
systems that should be allowed to accept inbound connections from the Internet.  
I see this happening in several ways:

The  college IT support units will be given a form to complete about servers and 
desktops under their control requiring inbound connections.   Some of this should 
be easy.  For instance, if they are running departmental Web or mail servers, that 
should be common knowledge.   

Faculty desktops, servers and labs will require a greater effort since the may not 
be under the control of IT staff, and may not have heard about the pending 
changes to the border firewall.  I suggest spreading the word:	
o	Campuswide email announcement to all faculty and staff.
o	ITSO and/or A.A. IT Coordinator presentations to interested faculty.
o	Peer-to-peer communication between faculty on University Senate 
IIT Committee.
o	SDSUniverse article.
o	???

Beyond cataloging ports, server names, IP addresses, etc, there needs to be an 
effort to capture and understand network configuration needs that are essential 
to teaching and scholarly research.  For example, Tom Impelluso has a class in 
which students do network-level programming to learn how to write and connect 
services.  This type of application might be hard to codify in firewall rules.  For 
these ‘special’ areas, John Ross will work with faculty members, IT support staff 
of ITSO to seek a solution that provides the required freedom of access without 
compromising network security.

Data gathering will be the responsibility of the colleges and A.A., not ITSO.

We are in the data gathering stage right now, and must avoid the urge to 
immediately prescribe a solution.