ResNet Online

ResNet Online was Bryant University's network registration and information site for computers in the university's residence halls. It has since been superseded by wireless networking and other computer information tracking mechanisms.

While I was a junior at Bryant University, I sought to substantially improve the residence hall computer registration process. Previously, registration was a manual process that could take as long as three weeks between the time a student registers a computer and the time that the student's port is enabled. At the end of the Summer of 1999, I designed and implemented an automated process to handle residence hall computer registrations, making the process on-demand for students. My position as a residence hall computer consultant at the university enabled this to happen as I already knew the relevant contacts to make the system official. At the beginning of the Fall semester of 1999, students were able to quickly enable their residence hall Ethernet ports, and the system properly handled the load without failing.

In addition to the registration process, ResNet Online included the following features:

• Computer moving wizard
• Student profile update page
• Integration with Bryant University's DirList2 student database to automatically retrieve student names, email addresses, and phone numbers, simplifying data entry for students
• FTP-based authentication against Bryant University's IRIX sever for logins
• Frequently asked questions that linked to each other using a simplified syntax similar to modern wiki software
• Administrative Ethernet port management that used asynchronous communication with the web server to enable and disable ports -- years before XMLHttpRequest existed and AJAX was a buzzword
  • This was accomplished by communicating with the server by changing the image location of a progress bar to include the commands and the percentage to display in the URL's query parameters. The PHP script on the server enabled or disabled the requested ports and returned an image of the progress bar. If an error occurred, a HTTP error was returned. JavaScript on the client side handled success and error scenarios
• Wizards persisted the data entered thus far into a PHPLib session, enabling students to complete a wizard between several sessions without having to re-enter any information during subsequent sessions
• Traffic graphs from the multi-router traffic grapher (MRTG)
• Squid proxy server statistics using a customized version of Prostat
  • I customized Prostat to retain its state into a file so that subsequent runs do not need to re-parse the log file parts that the previous run had processed. This substantially increased Prostat's summarization performance as I had it automatically run every 5 minutes for up-to-date statistics
• DialPad proxy status information for the underlying DialPad proxy that I had set up

More information being written

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