UMCE SYSTEMS & SERVICES
July/August 1998
Status Report
The Printing Services group prepared for the Basic Computing Package change of 400 pagesof laser printing per term, beginning Fall '98.
Server replacement schedule continued for upgraded Solaris servers. Only one server-pair site remaining to be upgraded. (AHA)
July & August printing volumes -- 11,172 users printed 652,700 images
Deployment of new HP 8000's delayed due to insufficient programmer resource availability. New target date set to October 1.
CORE JOURNALS PROJECT - project number 10013/T0002
The Core Journals project is a partnership with UMI deploying around 1000 core journal titles in all disciplines in image format, linking them with Wilson Indexes in MIRLYN and putting in place the necessary structure for printing, accounting, and billing.
Core Journal Print statistics
are available
at http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Systems/statistics/core/PRT9899.HTM
(CB)
The IMAP "rename" software was given to the Accounts Office for admin tasks.
NEFU (Network Fidelity Utility ) in beta test, running on "topsecret" in the Argus machine room, and will be added to a second machine soon. After sufficient testing and co-monitoring of services, we will transition from sysmon to NEFU.
Communicating with UMMC and Directory Services on UMMC's GroupWise migration.
Postmaster moved to the Email Services group, effective July.
(WC)
LAN Services -- Project number 10140:
Novell NetWare:
Microsoft Windows NT:
Microsoft Exchange:
Novell GroupWise:
Lotus Notes/Groupware (Project number 10058):
Online Directory Services (project 10622)
The purpose of the Online Directory Services team is to further the mission of U-M's Information Technology Division by deploying a set of high performance, large-scale, standards-based on-line directories that integrate various technologies and University business processes into services that are relevant to campus computing users.
Delivering accurate directory information to its users on a timely basis is the fundamental mission of a good directory service.
General Information:
Members of the Online Directory Team are working with ITD Web Services developers to develop a recommendation, timeline and cost assessment for providing an email redirection service for the Alumni Association's Online Alumni directory.
The prototype of a CGI-based LDAP client has had extensive review, recommended changes and enhancements are being incorporated. A release candidate is expected to be available on September 20.
Usage:
As of August 31 the directory contained 203,411 entries. It sustains around a half-million query requests per day. Directory usage was down during the Spring-Summer term. A weekly directory usage report is available on job.itd.umich.edu (please contact the team at diradmin@umich.edu to arrange for access).
New Features:
Technical Achievements:
The current directory server software (ISODE R2.0v3)
Efforts are continuing to improve the availability and reliability and performance of the directory.
Additional monitoring of disk usage was implemented to prevent directory failures due to full-file systems.
Strategies have been deployed for dealing with corrupt indices with out placing the directory in read only mode
An on-line batch update tool that will allow for updating directory entries with authoritative administrative data without placing the directory in read only mode are ready for testing
Arrangements are being made to secure two servers to serve as 1 a test environment for the current directory Sun OS 4, 2 a Solaris 2.6 test environment.
Netscape Directory Server 3.0
Was successfully built. With error checking off, build takes approximately 20 hours (with error checking 48 hours) cn index required 9 of the 20 hours. Work continues.
Related mail services: REQ, Listserv, targeted email (project 10592)
Following decision to proceed with a Lyris license in mid-July, began the process of transferring lists from the Macintosh Workgroup Server to the then-SPARC 5 machine. Soon there after, the REQ system was transferred to a larger machine ("fifth-element", a SPARC 20 running Solaris 2.5.1) and at the same time the listserver was moved to this same machine.
The Lyris listserver runs at a different IP address(listserver.itd.umich.edu) than the REQ system (req.itd.umich.edu) because Lyris maintains its own sendmail system and would otherwise be in contention with the sendmail daemon that REQ uses.
The Lyris server software has been upgraded several times in the past two months. It is now running V3.0b3 as of 9 September.
In July, the Lyris license was upgraded to one that would allow up to 2,000 subscribers per list. In order to accommodate the NewsfromITD@umich.edu group with some 2,500 subscribers. With this level of Lyris licensing there is no longer any restrictions on the number of subscribers per group.
In July several lists that had been in queue were created including a private list for the University President's office.
Requests for information have been received from the Alumni Association, the Alumni office in the School of Public Health.
The current machine (fifth-element) has disk partitions that are very small (the listserver partition has ten MB unused at this moment) and there are other machine considerations that are quickly being addressed.
Planning is underway to run an SSL-encrypted web server to secure the very fine Lyris web interface (http://listserver.itd.umich.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl).
Working with the Classlist/UMIE group to explore the possibilities of moving University class groups, currently maintained in X.500, to the Listserver. This would make these lists private, and individual members could not be determined by either other list members or outsiders, an enhancement over the X.500 group entries, and compliant with Federal student privacy regulations.
Becoming familiar with the rudiments of the Targetted Email, so that there is a technical expertise regarding this DSC-based service in the Directory Services Team.
Team members:
Joe Gelinas, Zoe Gurevich, Steve McFarland, Lance Sloan, Jim Sweeton,
Howard Young, Ellen Vaughan
(EV)
Subscriber count, as of September 17:
| Subscription type | # subscribers | change from June 30 |
| Maize or Blue package | 2267 | +678 |
| Custom or campus subscribers | 972 | -45 |
| Total | 3239 | +633 |
302 subscribers pay by check.
July/August Milestones: The new trimmed-down application brochure is available. In keeping with the goal of aligning UM Online with campus offerings -- the Basic Computing Package (BCP) -- UM Online will no longer promote package options. UM Online will be promoted as a service; component parts will no longer be sold separately. Options and strategies for accommodating existing custom subscribers are being developed and evaluated.
In conjunction with the move to a single combined University-wide connectivity kit, the ITD licensing group negotiated the inclusion of alumni to the Dr. Solomon's antiviral software license for one thousand dollars. New subscribers receive the antiviral software on CD; upgrades are available via the web.
The UM Online user guide, available as both hard copy and on the web, is being updated. The information is being made more modular and, where possible, consolidated with existing ITD documentation. The goal is to avoid duplication of effort.
RealAudio statistics are being reviewed in order to determine appropriateness of deploying additional material via RealAudio.
In July, the investigation as to why some non-graduating students received the final reminder email regarding expiration of computing service (22 contacted UM Online) uncovered that actual graduation data was not available from the Registrar at the time the recipient list was requested and generated. Since the UMOL staff now know that the Degree Granted data element is not available until August, the business rules regarding termination of service based on student status will be re-evaluated.
During July, there were 110 general information email contacts with UM Online subscribers and potential subscribers; in August there were 79.
Monthly statistics, including RealAudio, are available at http://www.umonline.umich.edu/stats/. (In August it was discovered that statistics for the secure areas of the web site were no longer being captured. The break occurred when the site was moved to IFS in the spring. In September, statistics for secure areas will again be recorded.)
UM Online core team: Linda Green, Brian Vaughan, Ellen Vaughan
(project leader)
Web support: Scott Williams
Technical writing: Susan Topol
Customer triage: Karon Bernhard, Chris Meono
(EV)
Effective at the end of July, Ray Guthrie moved into the position of managing the ABS service/team. The ABS team spent the months of July and August preparing for all the term changes for Fall.
Hans Masing continues to provide technical leadership of the redesign project.
(HM,RG)
General Purpose Computing Cycles
General Information: Collaboration efforts the IFS team, Web Services, and the Online Directory Services team continue. These efforts include work on campus on-line directory, group mail and targeted e-mail service, support for databases on departmental servers, and beta deployment of the Solaris 2.6 template. Service collaboration with ITD Contract Services also continues.
In July, we said good-bye to Chuck Lever who has left the University to pursue other opportunities. We wish him the very best in his new endeavors. Also in July we welcomed Lee Pearson to the team, Lee has an extensive background in a number of areas. Initially he will focus on CDE development for the PowerAdmin service.
ITD Login Service (Project 10001)
Usage: The IFS password file now contains more than 97,000 entries; the password file is 7.2 megabytes in size. The ITD Login service has 91,025 subscribers, up by 9 percent from June. On weekdays, our pool of 16 login machines supports an average of 1,800 concurrent users between the hours of 10AM and 5 PM, peaking at over 1,900 users.
New Features: Significant changes are in the works continue to include the move the machine room to Arbor Lakes. We expect this move to take place during the winter holiday break. Solaris 2.6 will be deployed before the end of the calendar year. Development efforts have been focused on service enhancements scheduled to be deployed on September 1.
Technical Achievements: A last login database was deployed on the login service, meeting the goal of September 1. When a user logs into a login server, this service will provide more detailed information to users about their login history, such as --
This information will also be available to the user advocate, and should save countless hours of log searching. Users can also periodically check up on their own logins.
ITD Statistics and Computation Service (Project 10006)
Usage: The ITD Statistics and Computation service has 1,249 subscribers. During the day, as many as 25 concurrent users run everything from SAS and SPSS to Pine and home-grown Fortran programs on our Ultra 2300. Targeted e-mail customers also make use of the service to deliver bulk electronic mailings. The list of software available on the service is available at http://kiosk.itd.umich.edu/software.
New Features: Work on the batch processing subsystem and alternate local home directory support on the main Statistics server, poleposition.rs.itd.umich.edu is near completion. New versions of SPSS, ESRI, ArcInfo, and SPSS products were installed in /usr/um during July and August.
Modifications were made to various scripts to remove dependencies on AFS and to make license manager changes easier.
Technical Achievements: See ITD Login Service and New Features above.
Workstations at NUBS and Angell Courtyard Computing Resource Sites: GPCC supports 10 high-powered UNIX workstations around campus for the subscribers of the ITD Statistics and Computation Service. These workstations have the same applications available locally on them as are available on the Statistics and Computation Service. The intended purpose of these workstations is to provide a graphical-capable interface to powerful UNIX computing resources. There are 6 Sun Ultras at NUBS and 3 at Angell Courtyard (specifically, they are Ultra 1-170s), and 1 Ultra at CSCAR (Ultra 1-140). We record an average of 55 users logging in to each machine per day.
ITD PowerAdmin Service (Project 10828)
Usage: This service now supports 92 machines (including the Login Service and Statistics and Computation Service machines).
Technical Achievements: The Solaris 2.6 template is being beta tested by members of the IFS team in conjunction with their migration to Solaris .
Specific usage and reliability information is available at http://kiosk.itd.umich.edu/status.html. As has been the case for many months, no outages or degradations in service were recorded or reported for the Login service during July and August.
Team members:
Aidan Dysart (student), Airyn Darling, Liam Hoekenga, Jeff Horwitz, Seth
Meyer (student), Lee Pearson, Gus Shaffer (student), Ellen Vaughan
(EV)
The UMCE Identification, Authentication, and Authorization (IAA) service is responsible for the UMCE uniqname service, UMICH.EDU Kerberos authentication service, and UMCE Protection Group (authorization) service. The Kerberos database contains ids and passwords for over 170,000 users.
We had performance problems at the beginning of the Winter term (slow file access, slow logins to GPCC machines, etc.) during periods of peak usage. The problem was that the IAA Protection Group Servers needed more computing power. Two server machines were upgraded during August to improve performance. The new machines are more than twice as fast as the machines they replaced.
The performance of the Orientation Server, used by the ITD Accounts Office to establish Base Computing Services for new students, was improved.
Currently the UMICH.EDU Kerberos server only supports Kerberos
Version 4 applications. In order to support Kerberos Version 5
applications, such as Oracle, we have started a project to migrate
the Kerberos server to one that will support both Kerberos Version 4
and Version 5 applications. During July and August progress continued.
The new server was stress tested at high usage rates. We are adding
code to the uniqname server to add uniqnames to the MIT Kerberos
Version 5 database when uniqnames are created.
Existing applications, such as the Macintosh
AFS translators, were tested in the new environment. We are exploring
using Kerberos Version 5 authentication with Oracle. Current
plans are to migrate to the new server during the Christmas break.
(MG)
The UMCE Institutional File Service (IFS) provides a distributed file system based on Transarc's Andrew File System (AFS). Students, faculty, and staff store files in IFS home directories. IFS files can be shared with others, may be accessed remotely from Windows, Macintosh, and unix machines, and can be used to create web pages. There are currently over 97,000 IFS home directories and the IFS stores over 421 billion bytes of data.
The Basic Computing Package, beginning Fall 1998, provides 10MB IFS home directories to all eligible students, faculty, and staff. The previous Basic Computing Package provided 5MB IFS home directories.
New hardware is being installed that will increase the IFS storage capacity by 150 billion characters. The new RAID disks are expected to be significantly more reliable than the disks being replaced.
The IFS team is migrating the eighteen AFS file servers to the latest version (3.4a) of Transarc's AFS software and to the latest version (4.2) of the AIX operating system. During July and August, several AFS file servers were upgraded to the new software.
Outage information for the IFS and IAA services is being collected.
These reports are still "under construction", but these are the
current
reports.
(MG)
There were no outages in July or August.
Efforts to upgrade the service to Solaris 2.6 are in progress.
(AI)
Traffic/server statistics for July:
| Personal sites | 14,037,160 requests served | 311,648 Mbytes transferred |
| Departmental sites | 14,941,769 requests served | 78,005 Mbytes transferred |
Traffic/server statistics for August:
| Personal sites | 12,914,919 requests served | 308,900 Mbytes transferred |
| Departmental sites | 17,050,003 requests served | 88,506 Mbytes transferred |
The following departments are using our eXtended CGI (XCGI) development space --
The following departments are using our RealAudio service --
Detailed information on production Web server configuration and statistics can be found at http://www.umich.edu/admin/.
| WEB Statistics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Month | #Requests | #bytes | #hosts |
| August '98 | 29,964,922 | 397,407,000,000 | 991,323 |
| July '98 | 28,978,929 | 389,653,000,000 | 974,431 |
| June '98 | 26,185,232 | 363,300,000,000 | 842,194 |
| May '98 | 33,020,461 | 470,678,000,000 | 1,087,264 |
| April '98 | 39,244,969 | 482,842,000,000 | 1,186,519 |
| March '98 | 43,269,428 | 562,826,000,000 | 1,397,258 |
| February '98 | 39,306,839 | 500,152,000,000 | 1,369,004 |
| January '98 | 44,224,703 | 564,978,000,000 | 1,421,379 |
| December '97 | 35,845,639 | 412,084,000,000 | 1,083,893 |
| November '97 | 40,298,091 | 443,271,000,000 | 1,263,023 |
| October '97 | 38,728,218 | 453,687,000,000 | 1,214,015 |
| September '97 | 32,966,652 | 379,847,000,000 | 989,069 |
| August '97 | 26,041,042 | 402,853,000,000 | 879,697 |
| July '97 | 23,809,743 | 336,930,000,000 | 840,724 |
| June '97 | 24,719,653 | 371,159,000,000 | 885,560 |
| May '97 | 25,344,926 | 451,719,000,000 | 987,880 |
| April '97 | 29,127,665 | 503,439,000,000 | 1,037,846 |
| March '97 | 28,982,975 | 526,444,000,000 | 1,023,042 |
| February '97 | 25,235,434 | 505,740,000,000 | 963,613 |
| January '97 | 31,910,670 | 543,198,000,000 | 1,008,447 |
| December '96 | 27,231,105 | 539,371,000,000 | 936,470 |
| November '96 | 27,148,553 | 557,387,000,000 | 975,816 |
| October '96 | 26,524,215 | 545,485,000,000 | 948,786 |
| September '96 | 19,600,827 | 382,286,000,000 | 734,210 |
| August '96 | 17,509,927 | 350,465,000,000 | 691,707 |
| July '96 | 16,958,757 | 327,815,168,000 | 681,536 |
(CK,DW)
Availability: There was no Confer U downtime in July & August
| STATISTICS | ||||||||||||
| Jan'97 | Nov'97 | Dec'97 | Jan'98 | Feb'98 | Mar'98 | Apr'98 | May'98 | Jun'98 | Jul'98 | Aug'98 | ||
| Total Conferences | 304 | 68 | 75 | 57 | 44 | 44 | 36 | 39 | 38 | 37 | 37 | |
| Total Participants | 11,310 | 6,660 | 6,733 | 6,837 | 2,300 | 2,300 | 1,316 | 1,350 | 1,360 | 1,377 | 1,384 | |
Some COW Statistics:
![[Your browser isn't
display
ing
images]](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~zoe/cow08.gif)
Availability: COW was down for about 3 minutes in July (due to Zoe's typo in the code)
The first scheduled COW Inteface revision is almost completed. See COW Modifications & Suggestions for the details.
Confer U & COW Team: Dave Winkel, Doug Heavrin-Brown, Linda
Green, Scott George, and Zoe Gurevich.
(ZG)
| UMCE Home Page | 1998 Status reports | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun |
|---|