Internet service overview

The Monash internet service provides high speed internet access to Monash staff, students, guests and affiliated organisations to assist research, teaching and administration functions.

Speed - dual gigabit fibre connection

The Monash internet service is provided via dual gigabit fibre connections to the AARNET3 network which connects over 38 Australian Universities and numerous other research organizations together via a highly resilient backbone stretching from Brisbane to Perth. AARNET peers with multiple "Tier One" internet provides in the US and Asia to provide high bandwidth trunks outside of Australia for research and commodity Internet traffic.

High availability

The Monash internet service achieves resilience and high availability by utilising multiple Cisco 6500 series routers, Cisco Firewall services modules and Cisco Service Control Engines to provide physically separate active-active equipment and fibre paths in/out of the university.

Service and data security

Monash makes use of firewall, intrusion detection/prevention and virus detection technologies to identify and mitigate threats to the provision of IT services and the security of Monash intellectual property.

Firewall rules

The firewall rules can be summarised as follows: Once staff/students have authenticated, applications running on their workstations are able to establish outbound TCP and UDP network connections. Uninitiated inbound UDP connections above port 1024 are allowed and all uninitiated inbound TCP connections and UDP below port 1024 are blocked. An uninitiated inbound connection occurs when an internet server or user outside of Monash attempts to connect to a staff/student workstation without that workstation having first asked for that connection to be established.

This block is designed to reduce the risk of virus and other internet threats attacking staff and student machines.

Application control and traffic shaping

Monash utilises the Cisco Service control engine's fine grain application layer control to provide fair and equitable use of the Internet service. Prioritisation and traffic shaping is available to ensure the Internet service delivers high speed connectivity for teaching and research purposes while minimizing costs related to recreational Internet use.

Internet application support across different operating systems

The Monash internet service has been streamlined to utilise and support standards based technologies available across different operating system and devices. Staff and students accessing the Internet via an authenticated Monash wired or wireless service are assigned a world routable public IPv4 address. Removing the need for Network Address Translation (NAT) or the use of proxy servers ensures broad Internet application support within the bounds of the university acceptable use and network access control policy.

Performance

How fast is the Monash Internet service?

The Monash Internet service is provided via dual gigabit fibre connections to the AARNET3 network which connects over 38 Australian Universities and numerous other research organizations together via a highly resilient backbone stretching from Brisbane to Perth. AARNET peers with multiple 'Tier One' Internet provides in the US and Asia to provide high bandwidth trunks outside of Australia for research and commodity Internet traffic.

Does the Monash Internet service use caching?

No. Web traffic caching was used at Monash until 2008. The dual gigabit internet connection at Monash services over 10,000 concurrent users daily. The number of users combined with the size of the pipe had increased to the point where it was not cost effective to scale the proxy server farm further. The increasingly dynamic nature of web content and the lower hit rate this creates with caching services has significantly reduced the cost benefit of caching data.