Report from CSG(geoffo)
Labs
We have lost the two Scientia labs for the session. Initially because one lab was afflicted with mould (though not as badly as the piano lab last year); then because the vice-chancellor needed the rooms. In their place we expect to have access to two of the new labs in Mechanical Engineering shortly after the mid-session break.
New Staff in CSG
Tony Williams resigned in late February. We have now advertised and interviewed for a replacement. There were several excellent applicants, an offer is currently being made and, all going well, we should have a new face on board in the next few weeks.
Authentication
As part of moving to using more central services, and to reduce the confusion for students and staff from running our own systems, we are moving to using zIDs and zPasses across the board for CSE systems.
It is now possible (and new students are advised) to log into CSE systems using their zID and zPass. Amongst other things, this will automatically generate a kerberos ticket which is used for printing and for mounting their UNSW central home directory. This is currently being mounted as /unsw/z1234567. After some discussion, we will create a symlink from ~/unsw to the mountpoint to make it easier to find and use.
Email
Continuing with moving to central services and winding down old (Neil Brown vintage) local systems, we are moving to using the UNSW Exchange email server.
People are now encouraged to move to Exchange as their main mail server and re-driect aliases to enable this. The are some notes on moving mail at http://taggi.cse.unsw.edu.au/FAQ/Shifting_mail/.
The primary advantages are: a system that is viable for the future; there is effectively no quota on email; there is much better integration with calendaring, esp when events are shared with other UNSW people.
This will preclude the use of procmail. Exchange has a range of server-side rules that can be used to do a lot of things, but this is not as rich as procmail.
We will be keeping mlalias and the mail server itself running for a little longer until we can replace mlalias with something else that will do enough of the job.
Storage
Our file servers are near end of life and we are looking at a couple of options for large storage.
The first option for storage is the central file servers (see above note about Authentication). This has some issues; particularly it is an SMB interface and therefore normal Unix file system semantics are not honoured. Nevertheless, it would still be useful and should be sufficient for some classes; and everyone can use it for large storage (much larger than CSE will normally provide).
We are also looking at storage on AWS (rather than buying and backing up more "spinning rust"). At our end, it consists of a virtual appliance that presents Amazon storage via an iSCSI interface. The iSCSI device can be easily mounted on our file servers. Peter is currently investigating performance (bandwidth, latencies) for a range of workloads and we expect to move a cohort of home directories onto it later this year.
Server Infrastructure
Most of our servers hardware is end-of-life at the end of the year. The future is likely to be heavily virtualised and the proposal on the table is virtualision server such as Nutanix or VMware's EVO:RAIL platform. The total cost should be much less than buying discrete servers and make it much easier to spin up and manage servers in the future. At the moment, it looks like there is still value in owning and managing our own hardware, but this may change in the future.