The purpose of these pages is to demystify IT and IT policy for faculty, students and staff in the College of Natural Sciences here at the University of Texas at Austin.  We have created this venue to educate and inform you about policies and best practices on the management and use of computers, networks, peripherals, software, services and more.  We aim to provide a clear path through the sometimes confusing array of policy statements, product announcements, and security warnings that abound in our technology-laden world.

We will start with a series of articles pertaining to information security.   Because there are frequent attempts by hackers to disrupt our systems and compromise our security, we will highlight the most common exploits and provide tips and information to help you keep your information secure and your computing devices and peripherals from being disabled or corrupted by malicious hackers or "quarantined" by UT's Information Security Office.  

Examples of the other kinds of information we will share: a description of the new Toopher app, how to configure a VoIP phone, descriptions of the computing resources at TACC; and how get a virtual machine in the University Data Center.

We will provide the latest news updates, both from major vendors, such as the announcement by Microsoft that they are ending their support for Windows Server 2003, and from our own UT IT organizations, such as the announcement that the Information Security Office will soon be doing another scan of "commodity servers."

So, we will keep you posted!

Mark McFarland
Executive Director of the Office of Information Technology
Questions or comments? The best and easiest way to contact us is via the CNS Help Desk form.