UMCE SYSTEMS & SERVICES
June 1998
Status Report
YEAR OF HUMANITIES AND ARTS (YoHA) WEB SITE - project number 10732
The Year of Humanities and Arts (YoHA) is intended to be an ambitious, inclusive program involving the many schools, institutes, and programs that make up the University of Michigan. YoHA, which will take place throughout the 1997-98 academic year, is being sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR). Support for YoHA is coming in from many units and offices. Centrally, the Office of the President and Office of the Vice President for University Relations have already made major financial commitments to support YoHA.
http://www.yoha.umich.edu/
This is the final YoHA report, and marks the end of more than a year of technical leadership from ITD for the development and maintenance of the YoHA Web site. The project is seen as a great success. Over the course of the project, seven School of Information students made major contributions to the site, earning credits or wages for their efforts. The site has received very favorable feedback.
Special thanks to Jose-Marie Griffiths and Victor Wong for establishing ITD's involvement.
Renovation of the YoHA scrapbook has been completed and deployed.
The YoHA site will remain online and be maintained by Lee Katterman. Technical documentation for the maintenance of the YoHA site was written and handed off to Lee.
Another CD-ROM of the site has been made. At least ten copies will be used by OVPR for demonstration and sharing.
Lee Katterman, Matt Stoeffler, and John Weise met and discussed the YoHA project, focusing on what worked well and how future projects might be formed.
Current month server stats for YoHA are available at http://www.engin.umich.edu/cache/stats/org-YoHA.html
Program started at Mon-Jun-29-1998 05:20 local time. Analyzed requests from Mon-Jun-01-1998 03:11 to Sun-Jun-28-1998 23:45 (27.9 days).
| Total successful requests | 4,267 |
| Average successful requests per day | 153 |
| Total successful requests for pages | 2,099 |
| Total failed requests | 367 |
| Total redirected requests | 4 |
| Number of distinct files requested | 397 |
| Number of distinct hosts served | 423 |
| Total data transferred | 136,802 kbytes |
| Average data transferred per day | 4,911 kbytes |
(JW)
MUSEUM EDUCATIONAL SITE LICENSE (MESL) PROJECT - project number 10019
http://mesl.itd.umich.edu/
This is the final MESL report, as the project concludes June 30, 1998. All MESL collections for which extended licenses were arranged (i.e., not Harvard University Art Museums) have been migrated to Digital Library Production Services, Image Services, and are online at http://images.umdl.umich.edu/
In the next couple of months, functionality of the new access system will be ramped up and will exceed the capabilities of the previous MESL system.
The MESL URL will be redirected to the Image Services server, and after that MESL production hardware will be picked up and moved to Digital Library Production Services where it will be reused. Development hardware will stay with Zoe Gurevich, as it is already being used by other projects such as UMIE.
MESL has been an excellent project. Congratulations especially to Zoe Gurevich and Gail Lift. Publications of the MESL project are about to be released by the Getty Information Institute. MESL has had, and will for some time have, international impact. Michigan made many significant contributions, perhaps most notable the central distribution service.
The MESL production and development machines were both archived to tape in preparation for going offline.
Program started at Tue-30-Jun-1998 16:42 local time. Analysed requests from Mon-01-Jun-1998 11:20 to Tue-30-Jun-1998 07:00 (28.8 days).
| Total completed requests | 2,487 |
| Total failed requests | 0 |
| Average requests per day | 93 |
| Number of distinct files requested | 982 |
| Number of distinct hosts served | 61 |
| Total bytes transferred | 22,252,787 |
| Average bytes transferred per day | 772,126 |
MESL ITD Team: John Weise, Zoe Gurevich, Katarina Lukaszewicz, Sandy Colombo
(JW)
377,626 page images were printed during the month of June. Preliminary '97-'98 year-end statistics show that we passed the 10 million page image mark for the first time in 3 years.
The printing team finalized server configurations and software upgrades for the Fall on the new Solaris boxes.
The Business School partnership development continued, with final drafts of the contract and the new server and printer/client configurations being completed. The Law School has decided to wait and allow the Business School to take the lead on instituting charged printing.
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/PRT9798.HTM
(CB)
Negotiated with Sun to replace the IMAP server hardware. The machines have been received and will be swapped out in July.
Fixed the "Netscape folder tragedy". (This is the problem where Netscape 4 accessing an IMAP4 mailbox would often delete all mail folders except the inbox.)
DNS -- We continue to try to educate users on campus about the appropriate Resolver Servers to use.
(WC)
The "Group E-mail Services" include REQ, LISTstar, Targeted E-mail, and Classlists.
REQ addresses the idea of a "Group Mailbox." Chuck Lever has taken over responsibility for this service and is covering it in his status reports.
Next Steps
Jim Sweeton has asked Sandy Colombo to approve our purchase of an up to 2000-member group license for Lyris. Applying the new registration number will upgrade the license without any reinstallation. He has met with Chuck Lever to address Chuck's security concerns about the web administrative interface, which will use the Kerberos/SSL interface ITD uses for other services such as Backstage. It will use the same hardware as REQ. Chuck Lever has taken over responsibility for this service and also is covering it in his status reports.
Next Steps
The target is to migrate to a new server platform as soon as possible. Still needed --
We need class lists by September, so we have to have the Mailing list server running for them by then. There's no real migration deadline for existing users of ListStar -- that transition can be gradual. The new service will be so much better that it would be nice to shut it down quickly.
The service has not begun charging but as of 4/21 everything was finally in place to do so.
Next Steps
No change. Zoe Gurevich is working the UMIE web interface. Mailing lists aspect of the service is with Chuck Lever, who is covering project status in his reports.
Next Steps
Hopefully we can test the automated web tools to process faculty requests for class lists in Spring or Summer for final large-scale deployment by Fall.
Since we have picked a listserver product, Lyris, we need to develop a process to create and delete class e-mail lists there. This aspect of this service will be Chuck Lever's responsibility.
General Information:
The Groupware and LAN/NOS Services teams are now working together. A business plan outlining services is in preparation.
The LAN/NOS team is in the process of installing new software and equipment that will enable automatic backups on all servers including the Lotus Notes servers. Plans are being formalized to move the Lotus Notes servers and remaining 2 staff members to the Argus Building so the Groupware team will be together. This will occur as soon as the new backup and recovery process is in place. The ultimate plan is to move all the servers from North Campus and those in the Argus Building to the new Arbor Lakes facilities. Coordination and timing of this will be critical to minimize disruption of service to our customers. Our plan will be outlined in future status reports and notification sent to customers as soon as appropriate.
Office of Instructional Technology (OIT) has negotiated a partnership with the Business School to develop new course offerings which will increase the volume and usage of Lotus Notes. Notrix, a software product from Percussion, was recently purchased by the Business School and will be maintained and deployed by the GroupWare team. This product will allow easy access of Lotus Notes databases to Oracle database structures.
Several new servers and disk drives were purchased in the month of June. LAN/NOS and Groupware are anticipating growth in the new year and will be looking to purchase faster processing machines if the need arises. Lotus Notes/Domino beta version 5 is currently in house and being tested. Anticipated implementation is the first of the new year.
Service Level Agreements and Memos of Understanding are currently being worked on to offer a fixed price agreement to our major customers. These will be in draft by end of July and final by August. The goal is a simplified billing process to minimize confusion of charges, and to offer our customers a contract for services provided.
NetWare:
The NetWare team deployed new hardware to upgrade the ITD Staff and ITD Support NetWare servers. The ITD PFS1 server, which provides file servers to departmental customers, will be upgraded soon.
The ITD-NDS NetWare servers are 50% complete on a hardware upgrade. These servers provide infrastructure services to the campus NetWare community.
Beta Testing of NetWare v5 continues. This product is expected to ship in late summer.
The Novell contract is now signed. We have a campus license for the next 4 years.
Work has started on an evaluation of BindView for NetWare and Windows NT in cooperation with other big ten schools (ITD Security Auditing group) to obtain a product for identifying our security risks.
The NetWare User Group meeting detailed Y2K issues for the NetWare environment. Gloria Thiele provided an overview of Y2K issues to NetWare Administrators.
Windows NT:
The group continues to work with the NT v5 beta.
Travel to both Microsoft Tech Ed and a Microsoft/CSG meeting revealed that Microsoft has much work to do before shipping NT v5. On the positive side, it is likely that we will be able to provide some level of integration between NT v5 and the UMCE authentication (Kerberos) services.
Work was done to investigate an NT solution to support CBTs to ITD Education Services. This project is now on hold.
Work was done to investigate the use of FileMaker Pro hosted on NT to support instructional activities on campus. This project is now proceeding on a Macintosh host. Administrative flexibility and scripting tools made the Macintosh a better platform for this service.
Work continues on the OM Digital Video service hosted on NT. Jeff Forth and Brian Vaughan are working with Dan Hague to support this service.
We continue to work with ITD Desktop Support to improve the services our combined group provides to ITD staff.
The NT User Group meeting provided the user community with information learned at Microsoft Tech Ed and Microsoft/CSG Meeting.
Backup Service:
Backup Service has been migrated from Cheyenne ArcServe hosted on NetWare to Seagate Backup Exec hosted on Windows NT. Backup Exec will provide backup services to both NetWare and NT servers. Staff received training through ITD Education Services prior to deploying this service.
The tape hardware that supports backup was upgraded from a single DLT drive - 10 Tape changer to a two DLT drive - 26 tape changer. This software/hardware upgrade should allow for efficient and centralized backup of the NetWare and NT servers.
Groupware:
Meeting Maker is now a service incorporated in with Exchange, Lotus Notes & Groupwise which make up the suite of products supported and maintained by the Groupware team. Steve Burling has joined the project as a lead for calendaring in the groupware space. Steve will continue to work with Meeting Maker, and extend his knowledge to Lotus Notes, GroupWise and Exchange. Meeting Maker needs charging implemented. Steve has completed Phase 1 by notifying all the UM server unit/department administrators we believe we need to charge. User lists need to be verified prior to charging.
The Exchange Pilot was concluded. Hardware was returned to Dell. Many
limitations in Exchange were uncovered. Briefly stated, the infrastructure
for Microsoft networking does not scale well to meet the campus needs, and
Exchange can not be deployed in a highly-delegated fashion. Some campus
units will continue to use Exchange at the department level. ITD will likely
build a production Exchange server for both NT notification and customer
communication purposes.
(ML,MP)
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.
Please see the on-line version of our Directory Services strategy report for details.
A prototype of our CGI-based LDAP client is available for review.
The bulk of the performance load on the directory is generated by mail500 e-mail forwarding clients, which now access the directory via their own directory replicas.
We are following a problem with the replica server software that causes a replica to crash under certain circumstances related to how entry RDN's are changed. It appears that Tim and Mark never finished this piece of the DISP modifications (these provided replication support for ISODE R2.0v3 directory servers).
Howard Young continues working on an on-line batch update tool that will allow us to update directory entries with data from DSC without taking the service down.
E-mail:
Directory.Services@umich.edu
(EV,CL)
Subscriber count, as of June 30:
| Subscription type | # subscribers | increase from May |
| Maize or Blue package | 1589 | +18 |
| Custom or campus subscribers | 1017 | +227 |
| Total | 2606 | +245 |
Milestones: A final reminder email regarding expiration of computing service was sent to spring grads -- to date, over 600 applications have been received (approximately 10% of the spring grads). The email message generated responses from 22 recipients who indicated they are not graduating. The email recipient list was generated from SCDB data; the discrepancy will be investigated.
A single comprehensive UM connectivity kit (the Blue Disc) will be available in August. UM Online will distribute this in place of the current custom-developed UM Online disc.
A new trimmed-down application brochure is being produced.
At the request of the ITD Consulting group, UM Online staff contacted a subscriber who exhibited support needs that were deemed excessive by reasonable standards (40 hours in the course of a few months). As an initial strategy, the subscriber has been asked to limit 4-HELP contacts to five hours per month. Consulting needs beyond five hours can be arranged on a for-fee basis. The call ended with the subscriber hanging up, the success of the strategy is not known at this time.
During June, there were 219 general information email contacts with UM Online subscribers and potential subscribers.
The UM Online budget for Fiscal Year 1999 will be based on subscription revenue. Since salaries account for a significant portion of the UM Online budget, core team members have all reduced their time commitment to the project in order to present a balanced budget. The team is developing creative strategies to "get by" and remain an attractive service to alumni.
Monthly statistics, including RealAudio, are available at http://www.umonline.umich.edu/stats/.
UM Online core team: Linda Green, Brian Vaughan, Ellen Vaughan
(project leader)
Web support: Scott George
Technical writing: Susan Topol
Customer triage: Karon Bernhard, Chris Meono
(EV,CL)
Made the Build Process much cleaner for AIX, SunOS, and Solaris.
Made it much easier for the ITD Accounts Office to transition graduating students to UM Online.
Added code to greatly increase performance on new hardware.
Began design for next version of ABS (scheduled for Jan '99).
General summer operations (especially Orientation).
(BD)
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.
The effort continued to eliminate vulnerable computer passwords, part of an ongoing campaign to increase security of U-M's computer networks and data. We are assisting the ITD Office of Policy Development and Education by checking passwords for the UMICH.EDU Kerberos cell. These are the passwords that most U-M faculty, students, and staff use to access their email, use for dialin access, and use to access IFS files. During July, the final groups of owners of passwords that can be recognized by a dictionary check will be identified, and the owners of these passwords will be asked to please change their password.
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 April, CITI migrated their AFS Kerberos Version 4 server to the MIT Kerberos Version 5 server. This was a small-scale version of the migration we are planning for the UMICH.EDU realm, and it went very well. Some problems developed with the CITI migration during May, and during June all of these problems were resolved. We have started to add code to the uniqname server to add uniqnames to the MIT Kerberos Version 5 database when uniqnames are created. We are testing existing applications, such as the Macintosh AFS translators, in the new environment.
During June, the IAA web page was improved.
At the beginning of the winter term, we experienced some performance problems (slow file access, slow logins, etc.) during periods of peak usage. We have made some software changes to improve performance, and we are going to upgrade several of our server machines to faster processors as soon as possible. The new hardware is being tested, and the production IAA services will be migrated to the new machines when testing is completed.
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. There are currently over 89,000 IFS home directories and the IFS stores over 414 billion bytes of data.
The Transarc AFS client for NT workstations has been made available from ITD software licensing. The AFS client for NT is a good, vendor-supported software product that makes IFS accessible to Intel machines. Transarc released a new version (patch 8) of the client in April. Information on how to obtain and install the NT client is available on the IFS web page.
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 June, several AFS file servers were upgraded to the new version of AFS.
Outage information for the IFS and IAA services is being collected.
These reports are still "under construction", but the
June 1998
report can be viewed at http://www.ifs.umich.edu/~ifs/outage/r199806.html.
(MG)
The News server had no downtime in June, and increased it's spool by 16GB.
(AI)
There was no unscheduled downtime on the production servers this month.
Traffic/server statistics for June (see www.umich.edu/admin/ for details):| Personal sites | 13,296,234 requests served | 293,543 Mbytes transferred |
| Departmental sites | 12,888,998 requests served | 69,756 Mbytes transferred |
The following departments are using our eXtended CGI (XCGI) development space --
Brian is continuing work on RealAudio usage logging. The following departments are using our RealAudio service --
We also managed two live broadcasts for Merit/CREN.
Detailed information on production Web server configuration and statistics can be found at http://www.umich.edu/admin/.
| WEB Statistics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Month | #Requests | #bytes | #hosts |
| 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)
There was no Confer U downtime this month.
| STATISTICS | ||||||||||
| Jan'97 | Nov'97 | Dec'97 | Jan'98 | Feb'98 | Mar'98 | Apr'98 | May'98 | Jun'98 | ||
| Total Conferences | 304 | 68 | 75 | 57 | 44 | 44 | 36 | 39 | 38 | |
| Total Participants | 11,310 | 6,660 | 6,733 | 6,837 | 2,300 | 2,300 | 1,316 | 1,350 | 1,360 | |
Some COW Statistics:
![[Your browser
isn't displaying images]](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~zoe/cow06.gif)
There was no COW downtime this month.
In the next 6 weeks we plan to improve some of the COW features. See COW Modifications & Suggestions for details.
Confer U & COW Team: Dave Winkel, Doug Heavrin-Brown,
Linda Green, Scott George, and Zoe Gurevich.
(ZG)
General Purpose Computing Cycles
The main purpose of the GPCC team is to further the mission of U-M's Information Technology Division by developing and deploying a group of high-quality, large-scale, high-performance computing solutions (including appropriate infrastructure).
General Information:
Collaboration efforts are continuing with Web Services, the IFS team, and the Online Directory Services team. These efforts include work on campus on-line directory efforts, umich.edu cell stabilization and Kerberos 5 migration, the targeted e-mail service, and support for databases on departmental servers. Pilot efforts with ITD Contract Services are continuing.
This month, we said good-bye to Melody Alfather, who is now working full-time on web/database projects. We wish her the very best in her new role. We welcomed two new staff to our team this month. Liam Hoekenga comes to us from ITD Contract Services. Liam is participating in what we hope will be a long-term exchange program with ITD CS to help familiarize both our teams with the work we do. Finally, we've hired student temp Seth Meyer. Seth will focus on issues related to Statistics applications and how we can improve the ITD Statistics and Computation service for students.
Our role posting for a senior-level Unix security specialist remains posted internally and externally. We've also created two new roles for the team, a DBA role that will replace Melody's skills, and a software developer role that will augment our PowerAdmin integration and development effort. These roles have been posted internally.
ITD Login Service (Project 10001)
Usage:
The IFS password file now contains more than 89,798 entries; the password file is 6.9 megabytes in size. The ITD Login service has 83,526 subscribers, up by 4 percent from last month. 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:
Three significant changes are in the works. First, plans are underway to move the Login Service to Arbor Lakes. We expect this move to take place sometime between August and October. Second, our network addresses will change sometime in the next few months to accomodate network address consolidation efforts at ITCom. Third, Solaris 2.6 is coming to the Login Service soon.
Technical Achievements:
Last month's security problems have tailed off since we found and closed the exploit that crackers used to break root on the ITD Login Service.
ITD Statistics and Computation Service (Project 10006)
Usage:
The ITD Statistics and Computation service has 1,262 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 continues on our batch processing subsystem and alternate local home directory support on the main Statistics server, poleposition.rs.itd.umich.edu. New versions of SPSS and the ESRI products were installed in /usr/um this month.
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 pilot service now supports 93 machines (including the Login Service and Statistics and Computation Service machines).
New Features:
No new features this month.
Technical Achievements:
We've created and tested a Solaris 2.6 template that can support Sparc 20s and Ultra 1s. We've ordered a new Ultra 10 (PCI-bus architecture) for developing support for the new Ultras being purchased across ITD and the University. Work continues with the IFS team to support their Solaris efforts.
E-mail: itd-login-admin@umich.edu
(EV,CL)
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