Browsing by Author "Gunasekara, H."

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    Attitudes on Mental Health and Intentions to Seek Psychological Help in the General Public of Sri Lanka
    (19th Conference on Postgraduate Research, International Postgraduate Research Conference 2018, Faculty of Graduate Studies,University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2018) Wijesuriya, C.P.; Gunasekara, H.
    There is a gross reluctance in today’s society to avoid seeking help in mental health even when required. Many factors such as stigma and negative attitudes about mental health have accounted for the avoidance of seeking help in mental health. In a country with such a collectivistic culture, seeking professional mental help is selected as a last option when other options fail. This study evaluated the relationship between attitudes on mental health and intentions to seek mental help among the general public in Sri Lanka in two phases. Based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), the first phase of the study involved the translation and content validation of four scales that measured the TPB constructs of: attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and intentions to seek mental help. In the second phase of the research, an online survey-based quantitative study was conducted of the TPB constructs and demographic variables such as age, gender, marital status, educational qualifications, previous mental help seeking history, previous mental health history and previous mental history of a close relative or friend. A sample of 200 English speaking participants were recruited via an online survey using stratified sampling method. All participants were above the age of 18 and were absent of a previous mental disorder. Results indicated that attitudes and perceived behavioural control had a significant relationship between intentions to seek mental help whereas there was no significant relationship between subjective norms and intentions to seek mental help. Furthermore, group differences between the demographic variables were further identified. It was discovered that while attitudes still have a strong relationship with intentions, the effect of subjective norms and behavioural control needs to be explored extensively to assess how it affects mental help seeking intentions. Necessary actions should be taken to reduce the overall stigma on mental health which will be one of the main factors in improving the attitudes of mental health in the general public. With considering the impact of educational status, it would be paramount to introduce the importance of mental health beginning from school level that will assist in reducing the stigma and attitudes on mental health for the future. Introducing positive mental health to the curriculum from a young age will assist in reducing the differences observed in gender, marital status and age from this study. Identifying the impact of the other variables will lead to better understanding of the stigma in the country and the path required to de-stigmatise mental health and increase literacy around the island
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    Cost Effective High Availability Transparent Web Caching with Content Filtering for University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka
    (Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Pathirana, T.; Fernando, S.; Gunasekara, H.
    The rapid growth of Internet usage at University of Kelaniya with the concept of “Bring Your Own Device” have increased issues with traditional proxy systems. The key problem is to introduce a suitable web caching system with content filtering which will enable end users to access internet without setting up proxy server details on their devices. On this study it is intended to analyse the network flow of University of Kelaniya and introduce a transparent system which will cache and filter the content according to university’s existing policies. The implementation should be a cost effective and a high availability caching mechanism which will allow users to browse internet without changing their browser settings. This will introduce a free and open source proxy system “Squid” and a content filtering system, “DansGuardian” on two dual NIC Linux boxes based on Ubuntu operating system and will be placed between Local Area Network and the firewall. Squid is a FOSS proxy widely used in the community as a traditional proxy provider. In this scenario squid will be configured as a transparent proxy which will listen on port 3128, using Linux IP tables all http traffic coming to LAN side interface will be redirected to port 8080. Default gateway for the servers will be the firewall while all internal subnets will be routed to LAN L3 devices by the servers. Between L3 device and servers, load balancing will be done based on port grouping. Before forwarding cached traffic according to squid rules, they will be checked against the content filtering policies of DansGuardian which listens on port 8080. Once content filtering is done it will be sent to the requester. End users are configured with DHCP and with No-Proxy browser settings and therefore they may not notice any traditional proxy as all caching and filtering will be transparent to the users. After testing and fine tuning wireless users for 2 months, the system was integrated for the whole network. As an influencer for BYOD, removing existing proxy settings enabled any authorized user to access the Internet through the local network. Number of detected end computers were drastically rising and therefore high bandwidth necessity was also going up. Analysing loading times and bandwidth peaks, it was confirmed that the system was stable. This made the subscribed Internet use rise up to 100% on peak times and more than 50% on off peak compared to 80% and 10% record for the traditional proxy. User comments were also positive than for the previous system as now they can bring their devices and do the browsing without consulting IT helpdesk for the proxy settings. Implementation of the transparent proxy in University of Kelaniya was the first long term transparent proxy installations in a Sri Lankan University which influenced other institutes to adopt the concept. Only downfall was this implemented system cannot detect or cache https traffic which were encrypted. Web caching and content filtering is crucial when it comes to network bandwidth considerations. In a university it has to be done with saving advantages for Education. The implemented system is a cost effective and reliable solution to address the problem on government and educational background. This will allow any authorized user to access network with their own device without any major changes.