To: Information Technology Administrators
From: Joyce Locke Carter, Dir. of Graduate Studies, Technical
Communication, Texas Tech
Re: Ports used by Technical Communication distance
education
Date: 22 January 2004
Texas Tech University’s Technical Communication program deploys its master’s degree coursework through a variety of technologies, including email, standard web pages, and standard discussion server software. For real-time discussions, the program has used an educational MOO ever since its inception in 1997. This MOO runs on a secure Linux box, which is housed with our other servers in a secure IT space.
You are providing IT services to one of our students (or prospective students), and it is likely that the two ports our MOO uses will raise red flags for you. First, port 8888 is often seen as a gaming port. Second, both of the MOO ports are seen as unconventional. Chalk it up to inexperience, but these ports (7000 and 8888) were what we chose when we established this MOO in the late 90’s. These port numbers are fairly conventional for educational MOO’s, which probably explains our choice.
This real-time virtual reality learning space is a key component of our mission. It is a very low-bandwidth service, serving text and a smattering of web pages to our students. Traffic to and from this MOO is dedicated to the courses in our master’s program, so there are rarely more than 30-40 users of this service.
In order to provide the student in question the access they need, you will need to open up access to ports 7000 and 8888. The IP address is 129.118.140.21 – these ports have been cleared through Texas Tech’s own centralized firewall services. If you have any questions about the nature of this MOO, these ports, or the Texas Tech firewall strategy, I hope you won’t hesitate to contact me (Locke.Carter@ttu.edu) or Chad Covey (chad.covey@ttu.edu), our departmental IT administrator.