Rapid retrieval from afar

General Article
February 6, 2003

You can access all your work computer files from home or on the road, via new, inexpensive, high-speed network

Accessing center servers from home is much easier with the Virtual Private Network. Photo illustration by Clay Eals

By MATT BRIGGS

And you thought rapid transit in Seattle is years away? Information Technology this week unveiled its own rapid-transit lanes - for Fred Hutchinson's telecommuters.

The name for the speedy lanes is the Virtual Private Network, a new service for faculty and staff who telecommute and need remote access.

By using the network over the center's high-speed Internet connection, telecommuters can connect to Fred Hutchinson and access the same files and folders stored on servers available from their desktop workstation. They also can access home drives, shared network directories and Exchange e-mail and calendars using Microsoft Outlook.

Already, the network is drawing raves.

"I have to do a lot of travel for the center, and I take a laptop on the road with me," said Dr. Shelly Heimfeld of the Clinical Research Division. "A lot of the hotels now offer high-speed Internet access. The early dial-up connection was really slow and barely useful for e-mail, and it had a lot of trouble with attachments.

"The new network is much faster. I can access other aspects of the Hutch network, such as my files and personal folders, directly. I also work and have broadband access at home, so the network will allow easy access to my files and applications."

Improved remote access topped the list of technologies that researchers and administrators identified as desirable, in an Information Technology survey last year.

Access from home

Researchers require access to the center network either from home or while traveling and using a high-speed Internet service instead of a connection over a standard phone line.

With dial-up, researchers must contend with sporadic phone service, long-distance charges, and the speed limitations of using phone lines to transfer large amounts of information. But with the new network running over a secure, high-speed link, researchers can connect to the center from a distant location and have the same rights to their server-stored information and network resources as if they were at the center.

While the center's remote access dial-up account allows home users to connect using a standard modem connection over a phone line, the network can pass over most high-speed connections, such as a cable modem, DSL line or institutional Internet connection. In addition, the network is secure, meaning it is encrypted, behind the center firewall and protected from computer viruses. Also, Fred Hutchinson provides anti-virus software with up-to-date virus protection to all network accounts.

The network runs as a software client or as piece of hardware. The software runs on Windows 2000 PRO, Windows XP PRO, Windows XP Home and Mac OS X.

$10 a month

Installed on a laptop, for example, the software client can connect a telecommuter to the network from most locations with broadband Web access. The user's budget will be charged $10 a month for each account, the same cost as center dial-up service. With such inexpensive, high-speed access, users no longer may need the dial-up account.

For machines running an operating system unsupported by the software client, such as Linux, Mac OS 9, Windows 98, a hardware client can establish a network connection to the center. The hardware client, a box that connects to a machine's Ethernet port, costs $200 to install and $50 a month to run.

For more information on remote access and the network, e-mail helpdesk@fhcrc.org or visit http://fhcrc.org/admin/it/remoteaccess.

[Matt Briggs is a technical account coordinator for Information Technology.]

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