Computing Service Newsletters
Computing Service Newsletter 235 (January 2008)
Progress Reports
The Progress Reports made by the Computing Service to the IT Syndicate in October and November 2007 included the following items not covered elsewhere in this or earlier Newsletters:
Unix Systems
Considerable work has been spent this year on the automatic update systems for various flavours of Unix used in the University. Both Novell (managers of OpenSUSE) and Sun (managers of Solaris) have managed to fundamentally break their automatic updating systems on a number of occasions over the past few months. Both of these flavours of Unix are relied on in the University and significant, urgent effort has been expended to keep them working.
The Service has commissioned 10 new mail storage systems for Hermes, 2 new front-end systems, and 3 mail switch systems.
The lookup system has been migrated to new hardware and a newer base operating system. Following the signing of an agreement between the MRC and the UCS authorising the use of the personal data, all the MRC staff known to the UCS have been added to lookup. Configuration changes were made to lookup's database system to cope with large groups. This works round a bug in the OpenLDAP server.
As part of the development of a Bulletin Board system (phpBB v3) to replace Usenet News in the University, a variant form of the phpBB system was created which supported Raven authentication. This was shared with the University community and will form the core of MISD's "Council business" web discussion system.
The Central Purchasing Office have withdrawn administrative support for the PC bulk purchase scheme, leading to an inevitable increase in work for the UCS.
Networks and Small Systems
Constraints in the UniversityÕs DNS system, managed by the Service, have been relaxed so that it is now easier for research groups within departments to get www.xxx.dept.cam.ac.uk URLs registered for their web servers.
Lapwing installations were highly active during the summer period. In the autumn, usage figures reached 1,000 unique users per week; as of one week in mid-November there were 1,475 unique users utilising Lapwing across the University. Currently there are 41 Institutions using the service.
The PWF Managed Cluster Service membership remains at 16 departments and 21 colleges. Several more MCS institutions decided to have the Linux option over the summer; it is now provided at 22 institutions, as well as the Computing Service.
New servers and VMware software was purchased in July to resource a PWF virtualization pilot project.
Technical User Support
In addition to the usual repairs on a wide range of printers and desktops throughout the University, the Hardware Support team has been dealing with a large number of student laptop problems: in particular, rescuing valuable data from failed hard disk drives that were often not adequately backed up.
User Services
The University Web Review team has been selecting potential designers and sorting out content.
The title of this document is:
Computing Service Newsletter 235: Progress Reports
URL:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/newsletter/2008/nl235/progress.html