Fancy a Rant? March 25, 2008
Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: Random, add a commentThe 23rd – 29th March is “One Big RANT Week”, the Mental Health Foundation runs Mental Health Action Week every year and this year the foundation is focusing on Anger Management. It’s an emotion that everyone feels at some point in their lives, and some people deal with anger better than others.
The One Big RANT Week is to raise awareness about the destructive power of anger and to promote some methods of dealing with anger. I must admit that sometimes a rant is good for me, especially if others join in on a group rant! While most people will admit to getting angry, lots of people find it difficult to admit they have a problem dealing with anger. There will be a number of sponsored events across the country to raise money for the foundation, some of the suggested sponsored events include ‘A Rant-athon’ where groups of people come together to vent their spleens on a subject, or a ‘RANT-off’ where people are given the chance to engage in a war of words to see who has the most entertaining rage.
If you want further information about Anger Management, any other aspects of mental health or to get involved in the One Big Rant Week visit the Mental Health Foundation Website
Well Hi! March 14, 2008
Posted by David Mccallum in: General, 1 commentFirstly let me introduce myself I’m David McCallum (not the actor in NCIS!) and I’m part of the Core Services Team.
Recently I’ve been involved in a new printing system pilot in the Faculty of Health Building. What is interesting about printing I hear you ask? The traditional model for printing has always been to put small desktop printers into offices, the printing pilot works on a more centralised model. We have 3 Hewlett Packard (HP) Safecom Multifunction Print Copy Scan devices (PCS) on loan.
The magic of these devices is that where as the traditional model required users to print to a specific printer (for example top floor lrc printer), in this centralised model users print to just one printer queue and then go to any PCS device and request their printing. Users can also scan documents or photocopy at any of the devices.
The devices require users to login with a four digit unique PIN Code to access the photocopy or scan services, users can also choose which of their documents from the queue they want to print. These devices can also be used with the University smart card system so that users could potentially use their swipe cards to login to the devices.
This system is secure and this means that no one else can walk away with your printing (or bin it!). Print Jobs will stay in the queue for 5 days and the day before will email you to remind you it is about to be deleted. You can retain print jobs which means that it you need to print it again you just go to the device and re-print it
There are currently one of each device on each floor of the Faculty of Health building
Virtually Virtual March 13, 2008
Posted by Adam in: Cool Stuff, General, Green Computing, add a commentTags: technology, virtualisation, vmware
“In a world of dreams, we are but Gods limited by imagination”.
As technology evolves, concepts change and users adapt. We find ourselves challenging our systems to do more and more with less and less. In an effort to minimise overheads and maximise efficiency, we are presented with complex problems and demands to ensure availability, improve quality and reduce our carbon footprint. Parallel to all these demands; costs, implementation time frames and learning curves are expected to be nominal.
To set up a conventional system there are many costs involved, including (but not limited to): research, strategic planning, environmental preparation, physical setup requirements, hardware costs, setup of hardware, installation of software, staff costs, time, maintenance and not forgetting replacement costs.
This cycle of expenditure is conducted every time a new server is purchased and partially replicated for systems which are reused.
Obviously as companies develop, using these same old techniques of purchasing numerous, bigger, faster and more powerful servers is going to snowball exponentially and eventually reach an unmanageable, unsustainable terminal limit of growth.
It is at this point we must realise, it is not that the services that should control the necessity for resources, but rather the inevitable obligation to consider how the services are governed themselves. In short, focus on how and why we run our services.
From this seemingly simple concept, it is all too easy to get lost in the inexorable complexity of modern networks and common practises. The essence of the requirement is obvious; we need to consolidate and share resources, allowing for the inescapable fact that no computer is perfect and systems will fail.
When considering the solution, one may be reminded of the renowned William Gibson and his literature, but that future fiction is here and now.
Thus we arrive at the proposition of a virtual environment, mimicking all the behavioural characteristics of a standard network, but existing theoretically, in a world constrained by the same rules of our physical networking reality.
After all, we must remember that computers are fundamentally just a network of circuits and components themselves, so why can’t we have a host which imitates a larger network internally.
VMware offers us exactly that. VMware, Inc. is a publicly-listed company, founded in California (1998), with revenue of US$1.33 billion and more than employees 5,000 in 2007.
VMware virtualisation is becoming rapidly accepted and it does not take long to understand why. In a world driven by hundreds of factors, requirements and demands it simplifies to equate into efficiency and cost. As everyone knows, to make money, a service must be provided and an investment must be made. Thus there is a drive to resolve the problem with the most cost effective method available.
This technology has grown from typically being used in a development environment; allowing for testing without persistent changes. The modern approach of a virtual infrastructure allows us to deploying dozens of virtual machines on a single host, allowing mass redundancy of servers which are only active during certain periods of the day and systems which do not require the full power of a dedicated server.
The infrastructure is deployed across several high performance machines which are clustered together in a synchronous group. Within this cluster they pool and share the available resources which enable maximum efficiency of system CPU and memory utilisation. This clustering technique also means that we can assure high availability of these services; imagine a process is running on a particular box and this host has a power failure or hardware fault. Each virtual machine previously running on that host can be restarted immediately (even automatically) on a different host within the cluster and maintain the same state as before the glitch.
Even more excitingly, assuming one of the hosts in the cluster requires some downtime, we are able to migrate (VMotion) the virtual machines without any interruption to service between the host machines. This maintenance mode allows for minimal downtime and continued service.
Having all these services running centrally also provides fantastic management and control opportunities, allowing remote control across the whole system, automatic events, dynamic resource scheduling and the ability to create a virtual machine (a server) from a template in a matter of minutes.
This might all sound fantastic in theory, but you may be wondering how and if it is possible to convert your existing system into this world of fantasy. Most standard operating systems are supported in this virtual environment, including Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris to name a few. VMware converter allows a physical machine to be copied (while running) onto the virtual environment giving us an identical copy of the physical machine and with a few minor setting changes, we can begin running the services almost immediately.
The process of moving the physical servers to a virtual environment is known as ‘virtualisation’.
With all of these benefits, it is not difficult to see where the future of hosted services is leading. Virtualisation provides manageable, reliable, efficient and effective systems which are cheaper to run both long and short term. Due to fewer physical servers, we need less energy to power them and with a reduction of heat generation, these systems really are good for our planet!
“The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” – William Gibson
Ultra Low Price Laptops, where is it all going? March 12, 2008
Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: Cool Stuff, Gadgets, 13 commentsTags: google, Linux, mobile-computing
Just as I started thinking about buying an Asus EEE PC, a company called Elonex have recently released a £99 laptop aimed at education users. Just like the first Asus EEE PCs they run on a cut down version of Linux. The standard model of these PCs have a 7″ screen, 1GB of onboard storage, usb port, network port and even wirelesss internet. The installed softare packages include word processing, spreadsheet, pdf viewer, mp3 player and even 11 games. There’s an upgraded version of this laptop that costs £119, this version comes with 2GB of onboard storage and bluetooth ! The full overview of the PCs can be found here.
So where is all this going?
With the aim of giving one laptop to every child I’m sure that in the future we will see the price of this kind of laptop fall well below £100. What I do find really interesting is not just the price of this type of laptop, it’s that these laptops are running Linux. These laptops seem to be setting a trend for Linux based OS and applications. Does this mean that if the one laptop per chld inititative takes off in the UK that children will be more familiar with Linux than with Windows? In the not too distant future is Linux going to become more popular on desktops in school classrooms, further/higher education and eventually offices ? That’s not really Microsoft bashing or even just a geeky day dream, if every child gets a Linux based PC then they will already be familiar with Linux which will be the norm to them. It’s not only laptops and PCs that are using Linux as an OS, mobile phones based on Google’s Android will be running a version of Linux too. Is the future looking like Linux will take a bigger share of the OS market, or is it only a matter of time before we see sub-£100 Windows based laptops? Given the hard drive, memory and software licensing requirements of most of the flavours of Windows and Microsoft applications, is it even possbile to create a sub-£100 Windows laptop?
Elonex won’t be shipping these laptops until June 2008, but they are taking a deposit of £10 that will ensure one is reserved for you when they do start shipping. I’ve just put a deposit down on the upgraded version, I’ll blog something when it arrives.
Edge Hill University’s open access Sunray implementation – Part 1 March 11, 2008
Posted by Stephen Timson in: Green Computing, Team News, add a commentStudent open access Sunray terminal project
We have recently completed our initial roll out of some 150 Sunray terminals for support and academic staff within our new £14m Faculty of Health building on the Edge Hill University Ormskirk campus.
The specification for the FOH also included initially around 25 Sunrays terminal for student open access use located in a number of learning pods located around the building.
As the requirements for staff and students are different, including different software and printing facilities this requires the Sunray terminals to provide different working environments based on the location of the terminal.
So how do Sunrays work then?
A Sunray is a “thin client” terminal, this means there is no hard disk, memory or operating system within the unit itself so both noise and power consumption are significantly reduced compared to a desktop PC. Another feature of the Sunray terminal is that because files are not stored on the device it is highly secure, if your Sunray breaks or is stolen your data is safe.
When you connect a Sunray to your network it will make a DHCP request to try to acquire an IP address and the IP address of a DNS server.
It will then use DNS to resolve the IP address of a Sunray server by looking for two default DNS names, “sunray-servers” and “sunray-config-servers”. If it is able to resolve this it will open a session based on the configuration of that Sunray server.
In most cases if no smart card is present the default action would be to enter “kiosk mode” possibly to provide restricted web browsing or as in the case of our staff implementation, a menu allowing the user to select their screen resolution or open a Windows Terminal Server connection.
It was decided based on the popularity of our PC based cyber café style “Touchdown” stations around campus that it would be desirable to provide further functionality and choice, giving the user the option of light weight web browser for quick authenticated access to the internet, or a full network login including word processing and printing facilities. It was also identified that it would be desirable that if the terminal is not in use it could deliver information to the students.
So what will the students see?
On start up the student Sunray terminal presents a dynamically updated and centrally managed information screen that could display news, exam timetables or any other information that can be delivered via the internet. Users can then press a button which will launch a menu giving the user authentication options including a full Edge Hill University student desktop, an Internet Explorer only session or the option to change the screen resolution. Once the user closes the Internet Explorer window or logs off there university desktop session the terminal will revert to the information display.
Edge Hill University’s open access Sunray implementation – Part 2 March 10, 2008
Posted by Stephen Timson in: Green Computing, Team News, 3 commentsSo how does it all work then?
The whole system is based on multiple Unix shell scripts. The Sunray kiosk mode (which in our case is set open a “Generic X Session” launches a shell script called “kiosk.sh” which firstly launches Mozilla Firefox from the Sunray server the terminal has connected to with a Firefox kiosk mode add in called r-kiosk making Firefox open full screen mode.
When launching Firefox we also open a simple locally stored html document. This html document contains an iframe which opens page stored on a web server, this is where you store your centrally managed content, and a java button which will simply exit the browser.
In the event that a user presses the “Edge Hill University Login” button the browser will exit and the next command in the script is executed, in this case a shell script to launch a menu adapted from our staff Sunray implementation using “wish8.3” called “menu.sh”.
If the user selects “University Network Login” from the menu a script is executed that will open an RDP connection to a Windows 2003 Terminal server allowing the user to login to the Edge Hill University computer network using the full Novell client. This gives users access to their home and shared folders and a range of desktop applications. When the user logs off the “menu.sh” process is terminated returning the user to the original “kiosk.sh” process,.
If the user selects “Browse The Internet” a script is executed that will open an RDP connection to a different Windows 2003 Terminal server, this time the user authenticates using LDAP rather than the full Novell client but launches only Microsoft Internet Explorer. When the users closes the browser the “menu.sh” process is terminated returning the user to the original “kiosk.sh” process.
The “System Preference” option allows the user to set their desired screen resolution, but how this is achieved on the Sunray system a subject for another blog.
The physical setup
This student Sunray implementation, currently in an evaluation phase is fully virtualised on a cluster of VMWare ESX Servers, there will initially be two Sunray Servers running on Solaris 10, two student terminal servers running on windows server 2003 standard with the full Novell Client and two Windows 2003 terminal servers using the pGina client with the LDAPauth plug in to provide light weight authentication against our eDirectory tree for the browser only delivery.
The pGina / LDAPauth based terminal servers double as application servers for our Sun Secure Global Desktop implementation which is also within a trail phase, which again is a subject for another blog.
How do you run two separate Sunray environments?
There are a number of ways to achieve this, some more complex than others. In this case I took a fairly simple approach. The student Sunrays terminal firmware is updated with the gui version which should available when you install your Sunray server software. This allows them to be configured to connect to a specific Sunray server rather than the default as used by our staff implementation.
This allows us to provide a completely different selection of services for our students from out staff whilst the Sunray terminals themselves are connected to the same psychical network and use the same DHCP and DNS servers.
How do I update the firmware on a specified Sunray terminal?
To update a sunray terminal with the “gui” firmware login as root on one of you default sunray servers and enter:
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utfwadm -A -e mac_addr_of_sunray -f /opt/SUNWut/lib/firmware_gui
Next time that Sunray terminal is rebooted it will be updated with the gui firmware. Once this firmware update process is complete you can press “stop” + “m”, this will give you access t the Sunray’s configuration menu where you can specify a different Sunray server.
How do I setup Mozilla Firefox to display my content?
To launch Mozilla Firefox from a shell script while opening a local html document is a simple command however, when you do this from a Sunray session you will most likely need to address number of issues. The first is that Firefox will always ask you if it should be the default browser, by default the close browser java button in your html document will not work and your r-kiosk addin needs installed for the Sunray kiosk sessions.
To resolve these issues I did the following:
* Login to you sunray server as root.
* Open Mozilla Firefox.
* Enter “about:config” in the address bar and change the following settings:
dom.allow_scripts_to_close_windows true
browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser false
Install your r-kiosk or any other required Firefox plugins and set any requited preferences and exit Firefox. All your preferences are now set for root, not your Sunray kiosk users so you need to copy them so they are part of the default profile for your kiosk sessions.
The Sunray kiosk sessions seemed to be generated, at least in our implementation, based on “/etc/opt/SUNWkio/prototypes/generic-session”, an educated guess at the time, so copying roots Firefox preferences there seemed like a good bet, and low and behold it works.
Copy root’s Firefox preferences to the kiosk users:
cp -R /.mozilla /etc/opt/SUNWkio/prototypes/generic-session
To launch Firefox form a script opening a local html document:
/usr/bin/firefox -url file:///opt/SUNWutMenu/info.html
And finally to undo all restrictions you have just applied to root’s browser sessions launch Firefox on safe mode and disable them:
/usr/lib/firefox -safe-mode
I don’t have the option “Generic X Session” for my kiosk mode?
It should be noted that when configuring “kiosk” mode within the Sunray administration interface the session type “Generic X Session” dose not appear to be available by default, in this case I copied the session type from our staff implementation.
The kiosk session types and session type configuration files however are located at /etc/opt/SUNWkio/prototypes and /etc/opt/SUNWkio/sessions. You can create a new kiosk session type by copying and re-naming an existing session type and editing the corresponding configuration files. If you require assistance with configuring the kiosk session types you should contact your Sunray support provider.
Our “Generic X Session” configuration file “generic.conf” looks like this:
KIOSK_SESSION_EXEC=$KIOSK_SESSION_DIR/generic-session
KIOSK_SESSION_LABEL=”Generic X Session”
KIOSK_SESSION_DESCRIPTION=”Provides a blank X session for running a Kiosk script.”
KIOSK_SESSION_ARGS=”/path/to/kiosk-app”
KIOSK_SESSION_PROTOTYPE=generic-session
That all sounds cool but what about a look at the scripts?
Some of the scripts I’m using at the time of writing this blog are Available on the downloads page (see the tabs at the top of the page), if they provide some inspiration for anyone then you are welcome however you do use them at you own risk.
