About us
Silicon Hill is one of Student’s Union CTU club, an organization that takes care about after-school activities of the students of the largest technical university in the Czech Republic. The club resides at Strahov hostel and the majority of its members are inhabited here as well. Some of them without any reward spend their free time on keeping local large computer network completely built and financed by students, representing other students at SÚZ or taking part in projects, lectures or workshops.
History
The roots of organized student’s activities are in 1993, when a couple students at block 8 connected their computers together and they ran a server belonging to one of them. As the time passed, more and more people got connected and the network was spreading. Independent on its evolution was created another network at the hostel, which should have served for employees of SÚZ. This network was connected to the CTU network and after a few meetings the same happened with the student’s one. Similar networks were estabilished at other blocks and they all were gradually joined together. The backbone network used 10Mb UTP cables and it was connected to the CTU network with 2Mb microwave link. In 1997 the link was upgraded to 10Mb and one year later the backbone was rebuilt with 100Mb optical cables.
The better were the network conditions, the more blocks were connected. In 1995 the blocks 2, 3, 4 and 9 joined and the others soon followed, until in 1999 the whole Strahov hostel, except for block 12, was covered. Since 2001 the part of the block 12, where CTU students live, was connected, too. The administration of this block is done at block 11.
In 1998 Silicon Hill became part of Student’s Union, which gave us better possibilities of cooperation with the university and other clubs. It was also required to handle the increasing number of members. In the beginning of the network was created a simple application in PC-Fand software, that was named DUSPS (the abbreviation of the Student’s Computer Network Users Database in Czech) and although it had many imperfections, it had been used until April 2001, when we created a new version based on SQL database and secured web interface.
In 2002 we decided to replace ubiquitous but insufficient old coaxial cables with more satisfactory ones. Consequently, the network was completely reconstructed in 2003. The backbone is now formed with optical cables and within all of the blocks a structured cabling is used. This was realized by volunteers with the assistance of professional company.
On spring 2005 Silicon Hill, which was only network club, joined Strahov Student’s Autonomy, which organized hostel activities of inhabited students. This increased the influence of the club and helped us to collaborate more efficiently.