Our commodity internet bandwidth (currently 1GBit) is purchased through Windstream, while our academic and administrative bandwidth is purchased through the University of Massachusetts. Connectivity between colleges is provided by the 10-gigabit Five College fiber-optic network, linking all five campuses in a ring with a single run out of that ring to 1 Federal Street in Springfield. Should that connection fail, we also have connectivity north from the University of Massachusetts through Keene, NH and then to Portsmouth. Each campus has a redundant connection to this ring. At Hampshire, we have one connection in the basement of Cole, and one in ASH.
Hampshire's network is a star topology, centered in the basement of Cole. Our core is a 6509-E with all DFC-enabled cards and Sup720's. In general, buildings are connected to the core with gigabit or ten-gigabit fiber, and have a layer 3 OSPF networking device with an associated VLAN and subnet. This is to increase resiliency, keep traffic local as much as possible, and reduce the size of the broadcast domains on campus. For security and IP conservation reasons, all of these addresses are RFC1918's that get translated at the edge of our network into a /21 of globally-valid addresses. All connections made concurrently by a single IP inside our network are mapped to the same IP outside, and your translation is reserved for 30 minutes. When we run out of addresses, all subsequent connections are made using PAT through a single address that can support over 65,000 concurrent connections, with an overflow address that can support another 65,000.
We have a ten gigabit physical connection to each of the other four institutions in the Five College Consortium, through the Five College Fiber Network. Any connection initiated from on campus to any of the other four colleges will get routed over this link, meaning we get gigabit speeds between the institutions on the Five College Network. We have firewalls at the edges of our network, one on each link, that perform firewall and NAT functions. These units are currently Cisco ASA5520/5550's.
The bandwidth shaper on the Paetec link is a NetEqualizer NE3000. It shares bandwidth equally among IP's currently asking for it by delaying top users' packets in units of 1/1000 of a second when link utilization nears saturation. It also limits the number of concurrent connections each IP can use.
The College maintains several L2TP/IPSec VPN concentrators for faculty, staff, and student access from remote locations.
The College also maintains both PBXes and Voice-over-IP PBXes for telecommunications.
Hampshire's wireless network is powered primarily by H3C 2620/2620E (a/b/g/n) Access Points at various locations around the campus, ensuring connectivity in all public areas of the campus, as well as all of the dorm areas. Merrill, the library, and some parts of Enfield have Ubiquiti 802.11ac access points, and FPH has Aerohive 802.11n units. Some high-concentration areas on campus such as the Airport Lounge, the RCC Gym, and the lecture halls in FPH have Xirrus wireless arrays. Academic areas have three separate networks:
In the dorms, the network name matches the housing area, and requires a Hampshire login such as wallace. For instance, in Merrill, the network name is "merrill".
Hampshire College's public-facing IP ranges are as follows:
Internally, we use RFC1918 addresses for all end-user devices.