Educational Campaigns

Our residents are students and ResLife strongly believes in educating them outside of class as part of their experience of living in the residence halls. In coordination with ResLife, Resnet looks for opportunities to educate residents about the network and netiquette. Two areas we focus on are educating users on illegal P2P activity, and proper virus/spyware protection for their computer.

Governor Schwarzenegger has mandated that the UC system stop students from sharing copyrighted material. Rather than simply turning off any file sharing port, or pulling the plug from the wall, we are attempting to educate students that people really are watching file sharing and students are getting in trouble. During move in week we distribute posters with the attention grabbing headlines to make people think about the legality of filesharing. We also distribute mail-box flyers with a similar theme and more information throughout the year.

In past years move-in month has created a disaster area at Resnet. Due to well-timed releases of network worms and the shear volume of people sharing the network here, we have literally had to deal with over 600 computers during the first few weeks of school in the past. The reaction of previous years was to take over a computer lab, make the student staff work 12 hours a day, and work on 20 computers at one time.

In an effort to work smarter and not harder we implemented a series of "group" cleaning sessions where students would watch a video and sit in the computer lab and clean their own computer while RTCs were available to answer questions. This was extremely successful. We have purchased licenses for Sophos anti-virus and make that available to all students free of charge.