Welcome to Whitman College and the Whitman community. Whit.bits is the official newsletter of Whitman College Technology Services (WCTS for short). It's packed full of important information you will need as a new or returning member of the Whitman community.

The first step toward taking advantage of Whitman's many technology resources is to activate your new computing account.

As soon as you have your ID card, check out the Activate Your Whitman Accounts article for complete instructions.

All students are now receiving email and storing personal web pages on a brand new server. During the summer, WCTS installed the new UNIX server "Students" to improve email performance and reduce some of the workload for Marcus, one of our other big UNIX servers.

Faculty and staff still have their email and personal web accounts on Marcus, but all students are now on Students. Beyond better email performance, you shouldn't notice any big differences. You will, however, have to remember that your new telnetSSH and FTP host name is students.whitman.edu. You will also have to specify this new server if you are using Webmail. Lastly, if you use an IMAP mail program like Outlook, you will need to change your settings slightly to find the new server. Make sure your "incoming mail server" is imapstu.whitman.edu.

For you techies out there who are interested, Students is a Sun Microsystems SunFire V880 running Solaris 9. It has four 900Mhz processors, 8 GB of RAM, Raid 1 (mirroring on all disk drives), a fiber-channel disk controller, 10,000 RPM SCSI disk drives, and 3 redundant power supplies.

WCTS worked hard this summer to completely replace the wireless network in Penrose Library with brand new equipment. Any wireless users in the library will notice much better coverage and a more consistent, reliable signal. You'll finally be able to take a wireless laptop to a study room or to the tables by the front windows without fear of losing your connection.