Subject: NU ITS Unified Edge Network Project - Network Maintenance in Nebraska Hall, SEC, and Othmer Hall on Saturday Feb 27, 2021

Campus IT (NU ITS) is in the process of completely replacing the networking infrastructure at UNL and all of the other NU campuses with a single common solution as part of their Unified Edge Network project. This project includes replacing all existing Cisco network infrastructure equipment (wireless access points and wired building network switches) with Aruba hardware. SEC, Nebraska & Othmer Halls in Lincoln are slated to have their network equipment replaced on Saturday, February 27th, 2021.  (Network equipment in all NU buildings will be replaced by June 30th, 2021, Avery Hall was changed on January 3rd.)

Impact During Maintenance on Saturday Feb 27, 2021.

On Saturday, February 27th, from about 6:00AM until mid afternoon (and maybe later), there will be no connectivity to or from anything in SEC and Nebraska/Othmer Halls.  Every network cable will literally be disconnected from the building network switches; new switches will be installed and everything will have to be reconnected. All Desktops will be down, all network printers will be down.  Any web or other servers located in the buildings will be down.   If you connect to your desktop remotely, it too will be down. All physical network is exptect to be restored by late in the day on the 27th.  This does not imply your systems will work the same as before the change.

For issues after services are restored, please send a support ticket to support@nebraska.edu.

While SEC/NH/OTHM systems will be offline, UNL cloud services like Office 365 (including @unl.edu email accounts), Box, SharePoint, Canvas, etc. will remain online and accessible remotely.


User Experience After the Migration:

For the foreseeable future, servers should continue to function as they have in the past. We have made an effort to identify any computer in SEC, and Nebraska/Othmer Halls running a service and tagged it as a server, so these computers should continue to function as usual for the time being.  However, note that all firewalls have to be adjusted so that clients can connect--this may prevent software from running.  Network printers may not work for you if your system was setup to use an IP instead of a hostname for the printer.

The biggest impact of the migration will be that user endpoints (computers) will need to authenticate before the device is able to access the wired campus network; this will function similarly to how your laptop and other wireless devices authenticate to connect to the eduroam wireless network on campus. If your computer is bound to UNL’s Active Directory (AD) domain, network authentication should happen automatically and no action will be required on you part if you are in-person and using your AD account. Other devices will have limited network connectivity until the user authenticates to the network using your UNL credentials.

If you use your My.UNL credentials to login to your desktop, you are likely on AD and will not need to do anything else to use the network.  If your computer and account are not AD logins you will need to use a program called securew2 to configure your system to login to the network.  Securew2 is available from the following links::

For Wired Conconnections https://cloud.securew2.com/public/25806/nu-net_wired/

For wireless/eduroam connections https://cloud.securew2.com/public/25806/nu-net/

If you use Remote Desktop to connect to your office computer, we will need to
fill out an 'exception' form to ITS.  Send in a request to support@nebraska.edu.

The other significant impact is that IP addresses will change for nearly all devices, and the new addresses will be dynamic. As a result, users will be required to use hostnames (e.g. engr-mydesktop.unl.edu) to connect remotely to computers instead of connecting to a computer’s IP address (eg 129.93.x.y). While IP addresses will change as DHCP leases expire, hostnames will remain consistent and should always route to the computer’s current IP address.

Any IoT (non desktop computer )devices also will need to be re-registered for the new network.

More information about the project is available on the NU ITS website at https://its.nebraska.edu/unified-network/ which includes an overview, answers to frequently asked questions, and more. Any specific information for Engineering areas we'll try to keep updated in https://engineering.unl.edu/it/network-changes.  If you have questions about the project before February, 27th or after the migration has been completed, please email us at support@nebraska.edu.