by Seth Novogrodsky, LSCR Faculty Team Project Manager
January 8, 2008—The Letters & Science Computing Resources (LSCR) Faculty Support Team provides support to the majority of College departments. This article is the third in a series providing updates on our computing support programs and other topics of interest.
If you are not currently using LSCR's faculty support services and are interested in more information, please feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Returning faculty and the start of classes make the beginning of the semester our busiest time. To accommodate the increased demand, we will make use of our student workers (Aric Huang and Daniel Henderson) and consultants from LSCR's other desktop support teams (Ohlone and Tilden). Although we will make every effort to get to all requests as quickly as possible, our response time may still be somewhat reduced.
The best way to reach us is to send email to fac_support@LS.Berkeley.EDU. Although we do monitor our message line throughout the day, using our email address will enable us to respond more quickly.
Also, because we use an automated ticket tracking system, if you wish to provide additional information regarding a request that you sent in, please reply either to the automated response or to a message sent by an LSCR consultant regarding that request so that "[LSCR Request System #xxxx]" (with the appropriate tracking number) appears in the subject line. New requests should be sent without a tracking number; the tracking number will be assigned automatically.
When making a request, the following information is helpful for us:
New faculty and visiting lecturers can set up email accounts as soon as they are assigned a CalNet ID by going to the CalMail account creation page.
In addition, many faculty and lecturers bring their own computers with them or have new computers provided to them by the department. In order to connect to the campus network, computers in certain buildings (notably Dwinelle) need to be registered with the campus Laptop IPService (regardless of whether the machine is a desktop or laptop model). Once a computer has been registered, it can be assigned a network address via DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol). It is usually best for the department manager to handle the registrations. We can assist in the process, including finding the MAC (media access controller) addresses of the computers; the MAC address are required for registration. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about this process or whether it applies to computers in your department.
We have encountered a number of problems with third-party ink and toner cartridges. In some cases, the printer does not recognize a cartridge just out of the box, and, in more serious cases, the cartridges leak and damage the printer. For this reason, we recommend against of the use of third-party ink and toner cartridges.
We do encourage users to recycle ink and toner cartridges rather than throw them in the trash. Campus Recycling and Refuse Services provides shipping labels for toner charges and postage-paid pouches for ink cartridges.
Are you considering buying a new computer, printer, or software? If so, we can assess your needs and provide you with specific recommendations.
College recommendations for new computer purchases are available on The Scholar's Workstation website. To get to the recommendations, go to The Scholar's Workstation website and click on Enter Store under Shop For Department on the right of the screen. Then click on Department Recommendations under BROWSE CATEGORIES in the navigation bar on the left of the screen. On the next screen, click on TECHNOLOGY RECOMMENDATIONS under Letters and Science. Although the configurations listed there are suitable for a
large proportion of users in the College, we recommend that you contact
us before making a purchase so that we can provide you with a
recommendation tailored to your specific needs, as appropriate.
We can also provide recommendations for printers and software. In addition, articles on purchasing hardware and software are available on our website.
As many of you know, the popular email program Eudora is no longer being sold or supported by its initial developer, Qualcomm. This means that security updates are no longer being released for the product, making it in technical violation of campus minimum security standards. For this reason, the campus is recommending Eudora users switch over to Thunderbird, a full-featured open-source email program. Thunderbird is free, and we have already migrated quite a few users from Eudora to the new product. We will continue with the migrations throughout the semester.
