The UW-IT Network Management Portal provides access to information about your network connection and self-service administration of network services to authorized contacts. The portal can be accessed on both desktop and mobile devices. Once you are logged in to the portal, you’ll see relevant information about your network connection including your workstation’s IP address, MAC address, and an estimate of the network performance for the subnet (if the information is available).
Features provided by the portal include:
- Information about your network connection
- Self-service administration of network services
- Ability to edit your contact information
- Advanced connection information, including DHCP lease, wall-port, and router information.
- Contact groups and contact group management:
- View the membership of groups you are a member of
- Add/remove contacts from the groups you manage (admin contacts only)
- View the resources belonging to a contact group you are a member of
- DNS Resources
- Developer API
NC is anyone responsible in some way for administration of network resources at a local (school, department, or unit) level. Historically, these were called subnet contacts and domain contacts, but the portal will eventually allow more and different resources to be administered. A NC has the ability to administer domain records, as well as IP addresses.
NCs also may be a shared NetID or a distribution list, but we strongly recommend that you only grant the administrative contact role to a personal UW NetID, as this will enable auditing. We also strongly recommend you leverage the UW groups service to manage these network contacts as built-in dependency management can be used to automatically remove people who have separated from the University and it allows for the nesting of groups.
Currently, Contact Groups have domain names and subnets associated with them (more coming soon!), and the Contacts with the Administrator role can administer both the group and its resources. An NC can be in multiple groups. A contact group is the level at which access control in the networks portal applies. UW NetID records on individual domain names are used by certification services to allow individuals to request certificates for specific hosts.
A NC has three possible roles:
- Billing Contact: this role will receive requests for payment for non-TRF-funded network resources. These include the periodic renewal of non-UW domain names and non-TRF-funded network ports. This role does not receive notices about network issues.
- Technical Contact: this role receives notices about resources managed by the group. These include the advisory notices from the Network Operations for maintenance work.
- Admin Contact: this role is allowed to manage resources and membership of their contact groups.
IP addresses and many types of DNS records can be administered through the portal. If you are an administrator for these resources, you will not need to contact the NOC for anything other than an exception request (such as other record types, or if you are out of assignable IP addresses). The DNS record types that can be managed are:
A
IPv4 Address records – Name to IPv4 address.
AAAA:
IPv6 Address records – Name to IPv6 address.
CNAME:
Canonical name – Points an alias to the real name. You should avoid chaining CNAME records: point to the name that has some other record types.
MX:
Mail exchanger – Describes how mail is to be delivered for this domain
TXT:
IPv6 Address records – Name to IPv6 address.
SRV:
Service Record – Describes the port, protocol, and preferences used to reach a particular service.
CAA:
Certification Authority Administration – Describes which certification authorities are acceptable to issue for this domain.
NS:
Name Server records – Used to delegate authority over part of the DNS to other name servers
PTR:
Pointer records (Address to Name)
There are also three special record types you can add:
netid:
Used for specific permission purposes: this grants permission to ask for certs.
comment:
This is just a comment that appears only here. Use it for anything you want.
reservation:
This is only for address records and is an advisory-only indication that the address is reserved for a particular person or purpose. Advisory-only means that it is possible to have multiple reservations or reservations and Address records for the same address.
The networks port can modify the most common types requested by the NOC. Use the Contact Us icon at the top to make your request, and these will be handled using the current system.
You will need to obtain appropriate credentials for the contact group and write some code. The API can be accessed from any language capable of making https connections and handling JSON. Code samples in Perl and python and documentation on API functions are available: https://networks.uw.edu/networks/apidocs
To generate credentials to use the API:
- Visit your list of contact groups: https://networks.uw.edu/networks/contact/groups
- Select the correct contact group.
- Generate or upload the authorization information.