Educational Computer Unit

Educational Computer Unit

The Educational Computer Unit at the Faculty of Engineering provides computational facilities for training students and aiding them in their project and homework assignments.

The Unit supports five Personal Computer labs with more than 90 PCs connected together through a modern network. Central network services are provided by many servers, two dedicated file servers using Windows 2000 operating environment, one dedicated print server and one CD-ROM server with a capacity of 14 CDs (it provides on-line access to archived libraries and reference materials). Three more servers use Linux and Windows 2000 operating systems to provide automatic configuration of networked workstations via DHCP, and intranet services like Web, FTP, DNS and connection to the Internet. In addition, the Faculty provides other computing facilities under the direct supervision of individual departments.

The Faculty of Engineering recognizes the importance of having a backbone network, with access to the Internet for advancing the educational and research activities of its staff members and their students. A modern network was built in the Faculty recently, under the supervision and management of the Educational Computer Unit. There are several distribution switches, where each one covers the whole floor. Each switch has a speed of 100 Mbps on each port using the Fast Ethernet technology. Each building has a backbone switch that aids in connecting the building to the other buildings through fiber optics cables.

There are 219 rooms and offices in the Faculty which have network connections excluding those that are not in use at present. Adding at least 214 more nodes the total number of networked PC's in different labs in the Faculty give a grand total of 433 user nodes on the network.

The Faculty of Engineering has a permanent connection to the Internet through a fiber optic line to the University Computer Center, for a speed up to 10 Gbps. This provides to every one, on the Faculty network, access to the web, email and other Internet services.

The Unit provides its computational services 24 hours a day, and maintains 32 lines of remote access available after office hours, so the academic staff can use them to connect to local servers, the intranet, and the Internet at any time.