Versus

Issue date: 3/14/05 Section: features

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There is one man who has had a more tangible influence on Vanderbilt than anyone except Chancellor Gee - and no one knows who he is. As the Assistant Vice Chancellor in charge of Information Technology, Matthew Jett Hall is basically the godfather of anything computer-related on campus. He has made it his personal goal to shake things up and bring Vanderbilt into the year 2005 and beyond. A few years ago he assumed this position, voluntarily leaving a $600,000 salary at Bank of America, and immediately set about strengthening Internet and network availability. His primary goal is to make what services we currently enjoy more robust and consistent. For example, his very fi rst action was to add a second Internet router, just in case one of them ever failed. He also purchased more bandwidth for the university and very recently upgraded the student download and upload limits from 1 gigabyte and 0.5 gigabytes, respectively, to 3 and 1, although it seems no one noticed. Over Spring Break, he will have everyone's VUSpace upgraded from 10 megabytes to 100 and would eventually like to make that number 2
gigabytes. To meet the challenges posed by the growing threat of spam email, VUMailguard has been implemented, which is a specialized fi lter designed to protect VUmail accounts from spam and virus-laden messages. His most important step for protecting the health and welfare of the network was to institute greater monitoring and surveillance. These are industry terms which he stresses do not mean that ITS is peeping in on everyone's IM conversations. Rather, they refer to gathering statistics and watching for patterns in order to prevent future outages or attacks. In the past year his teams have documented over 45 million "doorknob rattles" or outside attempts to hack into our network, and they estimate much more went undetected. To facilitate better service, Hall is currently in the process of restructuring ITS entirely, taking it from a group of workers with general knowledge about everything to one with several individuals with more specialized skills.

"Freedom, freedom, freedom, that's what it's all about."

In addition to strengthening our current services, Matt Hall has many

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