University of Vermont students, faculty and staff rely upon the campus data network for learning, teaching, research, communications, and recreation.  Moving proactively to protect students' computers from external attack, UVM has placed a fire wall between residence hall networks and the Internet.  Most students will see no effect from the fire wall.   Web servers or other servers running on students' computers are accessible on campus, but are unavailable to people elsewhere. 

What is affected by the fire wall

• Computers on the Internet (off campus) won't be able to get to a Web server that you run on your own computer
• Computers on the Internet (off campus) won't be able to initiate connections to any server running on your own computer

What isn't affected by the fire wall

The fire wall has no affect on:

• Access from on-campus to Web and other servers running on your own computer
• Access from anywhere to Web pages you publish on Zoo
• Access from anywhere to files you store on Zoo
• Email
• Chat (text chat works fine, but some video or audio chat may not be possible)
• Your access to Web pages, file archives, or any other Internet service
• Games and file sharing programs interacting with others on campus
• Games and file sharing programs where your computer initiates the connection to another computer on the Internet

When did this happen?

The fire wall was put in place during the summer of 2002.

Alternatives to running your own server

If you are one of the few people affected by the fire wall, you may have some good alternatives:

• You can publish Web pages on Zoo
• You can store private files on Zoo
• You can seek an external hosting service

The Zoo options are free, and space allocations are sufficient for most students' needs.  For information, please see:

http://www.uvm.edu/cit/zoo/

Questions?  Problems?

For background information on UVM's security program, please see the Web pages at:

http://www.uvm.edu/networksecurity/

The fire wall was implemented strictly for security reasons, and is not related to management of Internet bandwidth.  However, by preventing attempted, unauthorized access to on-campus computers, overall network performance may improve.  

Although many people have used the fire wall day and night for several months (including the Christie residence hall during the spring 2002 semester), there may be unintended consequences once it is put in place.  If you have questions about why or how the fire wall is implemented, if a service unexpectedly stops working once you're behind the fire wall, or if you have suggestions for enhancing network and computer security, please join the UVM network email discussion by writing to:

uvm-network-performance@list.uvm.edu