Computing Service Newsletters
Computing Service Newsletter 236 (April 2008)
Progress Report
The Progress Report made by the Computing Service to the ISSS in March 2008 included the following items not covered elsewhere in this or earlier Newsletters:
Institution Strategy
A portal for University and College IT staff giving access to a number of peer support tools has been made available
Networks and Small Systems
The Service has selected the Cisco 3560G-24PS as the new institutional Point-of-Presence (PoP) switches. These will be accompanied by a Redundant Power Supply (RPS) unit and Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for resilience.
Over the coming year or so, all existing PoP switches will be replaced with this new equipment and connections to the CUDN upgraded to 1Gbit/s where possible. The core of the CUDN will be upgraded to support the additional redundant links to institutional PoP switches. In addition, a new Quality of Service model across the CUDN will be gradually implemented to better support VoIP and other potential QoS requirements. Also, the backbone of the CUDN will be reconfigured to support more optimal traffic flows, better support for IPv6 deployments and handle additional resilience. The annual maintenance charges for this improved provision will necessarily have to rise to support this increased provision to departments and Colleges.
The University's ingress traffic from JANET/Eastnet is peaking near its link speed of 1Gbit/s. A second 1Gbit/s link will be brought on-line in the coming months and traffic balanced across them.
A new wireless delivery system has been purchased as the Lapwing service moves from a Cisco product to an Aruba product. The advantage of the new system is in increased resilience and a much better management system to enable future growth across the University. The UCS will be making an effort to seed Institutions with wireless access points at various high-impact locations across the University and its colleges to accelerate the growth of the service.
Currently there are 43 Institutions using the service.
It is proposed that the PWF Managed Cluster charges for the period 1 August 2008 to 31 July 2009 be increased by 3% on the this year's charges. The rise is necessary for the coming year to help cover increased overhead costs resulting from recent pay increases and the effects of the grading assimilation exercise.
Payments for print credit totalling about £30,000 per year are being made using the PWF eCredit system, which enables online payment by debit or credit card and depends on the MISD eSales hub.
Unix Systems
A considerable amount of time has been taken this last two months working for the University's Web Review. The designer's proposals have needed to be translated in to the Mason components required for content on the main web server. Similar amounts of work have been required to integrate their plans with the (commercial, black box) search engine.
The on-line University map (which is the master data source for CUP's printed edition) has been brought up to date.
Another major web development has been the integration of Raven and the University house style into the popular bulletin board system phpBB v3. An early version of this was adopted by MISD's web team for their use. This has been released to the Cambridge IT community as news of its development led to widespread interest. The Service's plans are to integrate it with Lookup.
The DSpace system continues to be the largest DSpace repository in the world. The project has now refilled the Dspace developer position and extensive work has been done on a web services interface, vastly improved logging and fixing many of the more serious bugs. Work has now started on integrating Raven (and ultimately Shibboleth) authentication into DSpace to avoid having to maintain yet another user account system.
PWF Condor, unfortunately, remains switched off pending availability of extra current and cooling in the Service's central machine room.
Technical User Support
The post-Michaelmas period has been particularly busy for Hardware Support. A large number of repairs and data recovery jobs were carried out on PC and Apple Mac laptops and desktops for students across the Colleges. External hard disk drives are increasingly used as data backup devices, and had failed for some owners, making the need for data recovery essential.
The AVA facilities in the Phoenix Teaching Room have been revamped: the room now boasts two interactive panels (monitors with electronic whiteboard capability) which it is expected will considerably enhance presentations and demonstrations.
As a measure to reduce network traffic, a new dedicated Macintosh Software Update Server is in pilot with the UCS. This is intended for eventual deployment more widely within the University.
User Services
A great deal of work has gone into producing draft University webpages for comment using the proposed new templates.
The title of this document is:
Computing Service Newsletter 236: Progress Reports
URL:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/newsletter/2008/nl236/progress.html