Core Services: One year on June 18, 2008
Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: General, Green Computing, Team News, add a commentTags: carbon-footprint, core-services, electricity-usage, Green Computing, Team News
The Core Services team was formed in June 2007, which makes the team one year old! It doesn’t seem like a year since my first blog post.
The past year has been really interesting and challenging, and in all honesty I’ve enjoyed working on all the different projects. The team has come together quite nicely and we now have a wide range of skills available within the team. This summer will see our most ambitious plans to date, I just hope we can keep up the momentum we have built up over the past year. In the next few months we will be looking at virtualising more services and reducing the amount of physical servers in use. We will also be looking at improving the SunRay thin client service and reducing the running and support costs of the Core IT Services. We will also be rolling out more SunRay devices to some key areas of the institution, one of the bigger projects for the summer will be to implement a new institutional data backup system.
Looking over the previous blog posts I realised that I haven’t been at an external event or conference for some time. I thought it was about time I attended a conference as so far this year the rest of the team have been having all the fun!
The blog entries show that members of the team have attended Infosec 2008, a Salford Software Technical Update Event , and I’m sure there have been more events that haven’t been blogged !
I’m visiting Cardiff University on the 19th June for a ‘Sustainable IT in Universities and Colleges’ workshop. The workshop will explore issues around energy efficient configuration, cooling and power supply in computer server rooms, I’ll be looking for ideas or changes that will make our computer room more efficient. I’ll try and blog something about my thoughts and ideas tomorrow evening.
It’s hard to keep thinking of interesting titles ! July 27, 2007
Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: General, Service Interruption, 2 commentsTags: athens, core-services, Identity-Management, novell, shibboleth
Our application to join the UK Federation has been processed and on Wednesday EH become a member of the UK Federation. We are currently testing out our Shibboleth server and in the next week or so we will be hooking it up to the UK Federation. In the next few weeks we will be working with Learning Services to implement federated access to the Athens resources. Just as a random thought, I quite like the word Shibboleth, it’s much better than using an acronym like IDM, SOAP or some kind of code like ISO9001. Shibboleth can be shortened to Shib if your feeling a bit lazy or you can’t remember how to spell it, Shibby if your looking for a name for your cat, or if your feeling a bit light headed after too much caffeine – ShibbyWibbyWoo!
If you interested in the origins of the word Shibboleth look no further than Wikipedia. Have a look, it really is quite interesting.
The work scheduled for tomorrow (Saturday) will pave the way for the new version of GO. We will be simplifying the Identity Management Systems we currently have in place. What will this mean for the users ? Well users won’t really see anything different as this work will be done on the behind the scenes stuff. From next week there will be fewer user password problems and fewer problems logging in. The changes will also make it easier for the IT help desks to resolve your network account problems. Once the weekend work is complete we will be moving onto implementing Novell Access Manager This will also form part of the new version of GO.
There is a group of us going to visit Sun Microsystems on Tuesday. We are going to see the Sun Ray thin client devices. I’ve mentioned these devices in a previous post. It is quite possible that EH users will see machines like these (or something similar) replacing PCs on desktops around the institution. I’ll post something here when we get back.
A busy week July 7, 2007
Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: Team News, add a commentTags: core-services, e-mail, Groupwise, Spam
Interviews were held for the Senior Core Services officers posts on Tuesday, we have offered the posts to two candidates and we are waiting for the usual HR procedures to be completed. There is also a Core Services Officer post advertised externally, the closing date for applications is the 20th July. We are aiming to have all three of these posts in place for the 1st August, at that point the Core Services Team will officially come on line.
Our Anti-Spam appliance trial officialy started on Thursday afternoon, and despite some minor teething issues I’m please to report that the Anti-Spam appliance performance is very impressive. Our Customer Services Manager will be making everyone aware of the User Interface on Monday. The User Interface will allow users to login and view any e-mail that has been identified as Spam. Users are then given the option to block, delete or release e-mail into their e-mail accounts.
There has been a team of people (including myself) at EH today working on the Groupwise e-mail system. We are trying to improve performance and have been making some changes to the system on the advice of our external IT support. We are back in on Sunday morning to finish things off. Here’s hoping that next week is a bit quieter.
