Review of the ITSC IT System Maintenance Schedule
The primary mission of the Information Technology Services Centre is to operate and develop Information Technology (IT) services to support and promote the instructional, research and administrative activities of the University. To fulfil this mission, one of our major concerns is to maintain a high availability of the IT services to University users.

Nevertheless, most of the services/systems need to be shut down regularly in order to carry out maintenance work including users' file back up, system testing, software/hardware upgrades etc. In addition, special system maintenance activities may be scheduled to fix emergency problems. During system maintenance periods, users cannot access some of all services as usual.

To minimize the impact of system non-availability during the maintenance period, we implemented the following starting from March 1.

• Maintenance Period of Campus-wide E-mail System (Mailserv) Shortened from 3am-1pm to 7am-1pm
• ITSC PC LAN Maintenance Schedule Reduced from biweekly to every four weeks

A consultation paper addressing the above changes is now available on the web (http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/itsc/sys_ava/paper990309.html) . If you have any comments on this proposed change, please send them by May 15 to policy-help@cuhk.edu.hk

Consult with Business Partners and Make a Contingency Plan for Y2K Matters
If you have business partners who are involved with applications you use and which may have Y2K concerns, please work with them to understand their Y2K plans and to co-ordinate any rectification work. Don't wait for them to approach you!

No one really knows what will happen when the clock ticks into the new millennium. However, there is one thing for sure - if you have made a contingency plan for your business applications, the damage will be minimized should these applications fail to work.

Read http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/y2k/y2k-bus.html for more information.

More Seminars on Learning Technology
The January-February series aimed at providing you an overview of the technology for teaching and learning while the March-May series will focus on applications of the technology. The theme for the March program is web-page authoring and includes,

• Publishing Your Web Page on iHome CUHK Community Home Page Server
• Creating Web-Ready Chinese Documents with DynaDoc
• Statistical Analysis Using SPSS
• HTML Workshop Part 1: Building a Simple Web Page

Enrollment can be made on-line at http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/itsc/learning/workshops starting from March 15.

ClassNet Service Extends to Y C Liang Hall and Mong Man Wai Building
ClassNet provides networking outlets in lecture theatres and classrooms so teaching staff and students can access the Campus Network and the Internet during lectures and tutorials.

The service has now been extended to the YC Liang Hall and Mong Man Wai Building. You can take your own notebook computers or log in using the built-in computers at those sites. Together with audio-visual equipment and multimedia applications, these facilities can enhance teaching and learning.

Details can be found at http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/itsc/network/classnet .

Decommissioning 137.189.6.1 as a Name Server on the Campus
If you find your computer cannot access the Campus Network and Internet services after Feb 22 1999, you should check whether your computer is still using 137.189.6.1 as the name server. On Feb 22 1999, the name server 137.189.6.1 was finally decommissioned from serving the campus.

Please refer to http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/itsc/network/nameserver.html for the configuration details.

For most users, there is no impact at all because ITSC has been asking users to use other name servers (137.189.192.3, 137.189.196.3) for the last several years. Only a small group of users, who still use our recommendation of three or four years ago, might have trouble connecting to other computers.