Core Services Cumulative Monthly Report, November/December 2002
Overview
With this report, we begin a new organization reflective of current Core
Services goals. In addition, work toward the goals will be reported cumulatively
so as to provide a better indication of progress.
We positioned ourselves well at the end of the calendar year in a number
of areas. The first of two production server upgrades went smoothly and quickly,
addressing urgent server stability problems; the LMS server was configured
and ordered on schedule; and, plans for further upgrades in the development
environment were developed.
Wrap-up of the first phase of IT Commons work (final inventory reports)
was completed, and LMS activity began to increase in pace as contract language
was finalized.
- Refining and Improving Core Infrastructure
- New storage model.
- Nov/Dec: Marsh and Snavely continued to collect information
on NAS and SAN related technologies for our upcoming storage needs and
new storage model.
- Redundant web services.
- Production server replacement.
- Nov/Dec: Marsh replaced DLPS1 with a new Sun 280R server,
dlps8, and coordinated the transfer of services.
- Nov/Dec: Marsh and Snavely coordinated the removal of failing
storage equipment from dlps4.
- Development server replacement.
- Nov/Dec: Marsh prepared and ordered configurations for
replacement servers for fizzie and kukicha.
- DHCP services.
- Image and OCR processing workflows.
- Nov/Dec: Snavely began planning work for the LLMC project
with Bonn and Stephenson.
- Digital object integrity.
- Cost model.
- Nov/Dec: Snavely developed a provisional model for tracking
server administration costs and began to apply the model to generate several
cost estimates.
- Documentation.
- Technology trends awareness.
- Nov/Dec: Snavely began receiving subscriptions of several
IT publications.
- Support and Development for Access Systems
- Library management system implementation.
- Nov/Dec: Marsh, Snavely, and Prettyman researched server
configurations for the LMS development server. Many different configurations
were explored and many sales quotes generated. An eight-processor Sunfire
4800 with two attached 400GB disk arrays was chosen and ordered.
- DLXS.
- Production OAI harvesting.
- Nov/Dec: Marsh and Snavely coordinated a meeting with
data preparation staff and developed a plan to run data preparation and OAI
harvesting on the same (new) server. Funds for the server will be supplied
jointly by the OAI grant and Core Services.
- Institutional repository initiative.
- Collaborating with Other Areas of the Library and the
University
- Library/Core Services coordination.
- IT Commons.
- Nov/Dec: Snavely contributed heavily to the Authentication/Authorization
and Directory working groups to help prepare final reports, due at year's
end.
- CHEF/DLXS integration.
- Nov/Dec: Snavely participated in a joint meeting with
other DLXS staff and the CHEF group to help provide a better understanding
of the DLXS system.
- Integration with campus authentication.
- Nov/Dec: Snavely joined the COSIGN co-design group and
attended his first meeting to get an overview of the COSIGN system architecture
and workings.
- Miscellaneous/Unplanned
- Nov/Dec: Marsh, working closely with DSS, reorganized space
in room 10 to consolidate space usage and accommodate new servers.
- Nov/Dec: Marsh applied OpenSSL and sendmail upgrades to
resolve security vulnerabilities on several servers.
- Nov/Dec: Marsh upgraded Perl from 5.6.1 to 5.8.0 on all
systems not scheduled for near-term retirement.
- System Performance
- Central Campus server environment: All services were unavailable
on Thursday, December 26 from 8:00am to 11:00am due to a scheduled electrical
service outage.
- betty.umdl (MedSearch server): No additional down time
- coffee.umdl (Oracle server for access control): No additional
down time
- hank.umdl (Library Web Server): No additional down time
- myrna.umdl (MIRLYNWeb server): No additional down time
- opal.umdl (SilverPlatter server): No additional down time
- North Campus server environment: All services were unavailable
on Tuesday, December 31 from 12:00pm to 4:00pm due to an unscheduled cooling
problem.
- dlps1.umdl (non-public collections): Down on Friday, December 6
from 8:30am to 9:45am due to a memory failure
- dlps3.umdl (Image Services): No down time
- dlps4.umdl (primary web server for DLPS and public collections):
Down from Saturday, December 7 at 6:05pm to Sunday, December 8 at 1:30pm
due to a storage failure; down briefly on Monday, December 16 from 3:10pm
to 3:15pm while a failing storage subsystem was being removed.
- dlps5.umdl (library proxy server): Down on Tuesday, October 22
from 7:52am to 7:55am to make an operating system configuration change
- dlps6.umdl (Oracle server for access control and usage statistics):
No down time
- dlps7.umdl (Numeric Data server): No down time