Monday, January 31, 1993

BACK TO NORMAL:  You'd hardly know this morning that the campus had been
closed by Friday's ice storm.  Among things rescheduled because of the
Friday closing was a joint meeting of the senate finance and long-range
planning committees, to talk seriously about UW's budgt and its future.
The meeting will be held this Friday afternoon (February 4).

HAPPENING TODAY:  Here are a few events of special note:

A student "forum" on the possibility of ancillary fees to pay for
student services will be starting at 10:30 a.m. in Engineering Lecutre
room 105, says Catherine Coleman, president of the Federation of Students.
Another forum is set for tomorrow at 10 a.m. in Davis Centre 1301.  (And
Duncan Phillips, president of the Graduate Student Association, notes
that a similar forum explicitly for graduate students will be happening
next Wednesday, February 9, at 3:30 in Davis Centre 1351.

Wes Graham, the father of computing at Waterloo, will speak tonight in
the first of this winter's public lectures sponsored by the Institute for
Computer Research.  His topic: "Computing at Waterloo -- The First
Decade".  The talk starts at 8 p.m. in Davis Centre 1302.

The engineering faculty assembly holds its once-a-year meeting today, at
3:30 in Carl Pollock Hall 3385.  The agenda consists of massive reports
from the three associate deans covering all that's been happening in
engineering over the past year.

INTERVIEWS BEGIN:  Today's the first day of interviews for co-op students
seeking spring term jobs.  The co-op department says it's been doing its
best to notify students who have interviews today, and who may have missed
the posted announcements because of Friday's storm.

YOUR COMPUTER;  Computing services staff, and system adminstrators across
campus, have had a busy few days. From an announcement by Roger Watt of DCS:
"At 08:00 on Monday January 31, the backbone routers in the campus network
will be changed to implement the new subnet mask. Every device in the
network must be reconfigured and restarted as soon as possible after
08:00, in order to communicate correctly across the network. . . .
This change is necessary because the 255.255.254.0 mask enables only
126 IP subnets (each containing a max of 510 IP addresses). Most of those
subnet numbers are now in use due to large growth of the network over the
past three years. The change enables a total of 254 IP subnets (each
containing a max of 254 IP addresses)."

How are people affected?  "No change whose consequence is of this magnitude 
can be done transparently, but we have tried to limit the extent of the 
disruption as much as possible. There will be a brief outage of network 
connectivity, both off campus and between subnets, while the backbone routers
(cn-onet,cn-dc,cn-mc,cn-phy) are being restarted with their new
configurations at 08:00."  So everything should be back to normal by
about now.

Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs
credmond@watserv1    ext. 3004