Update on the weekend downtime November 11, 2007
Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: General, Service Interruption, add a commentTags: Email, novell, virtualisation
All the work planned for the weekend has been completed and I thought that you might want to know what we actually did.
The main reason for the downtime was to add an extra Terabyte (1000 gigabytes) to the Shared Storage. The Shared Storage is where the Home Directories (f:) and Shared Directories (g: and m:) are stored. Some of the servers that run GO, the Email servers and some of the web servers also use the Shared Storage. This is why a wide range of services needed to be turned off during the work. The extra storage will be used to increase the space available for home directories, shared folders and email. It will also be used for the virtualisation project that is due to start in December.
We also applied some software patches to the Novell network servers, the software patch was the latest service patch from Novell and should resolve a number of minor issues we have been experiencing on some of the servers.
GO was also down to allow us to re-install one of the GO servers, this needed to be done to allow us to make some further improvements in the next week or so. We are going to trial a load balancing product, in the event of a server failure the load balancer will redirect users to another server without them ever being aware that there was a problem. We can test the load balancing product without any further disruption or downtime.
We have also done some tidying up and moving around of hardware in the main server room, this is to make room for the new servers that will be needed to provide IT Services to the new Faculty of Health building. I’ll post more about this nearer the time.
Salford Software Technical Update Event – 30th October November 1, 2007
Posted by Neil Malcolm in: Events, Team News, 2 commentsTags: Linux, novell, OES, Security
Having recently joined the Core Services team this will be my very first (of many) blogs as Senior Core Services Officer.
One company we work closely with in IT Services is Salford Software, based in Mancheser our reseller of choice for all Novell products and support invited us to their ‘Technical Update Day’ on the 30th October.
So it was time to cram the team into a Grab ‘n Go car and head to Lancashire Cricket Club for the event that was designed to update there customers with the changes in the next releases of Novell products.
Misjudging the M62 traffic we arrived there in plenty of time, in fact we were the first people there which allowed us to take advantage of the jugs of coffee and plates of biscuits laid on for us! A good start to be fair!……
First up was Matt Dunkin from Salford Software, now pre-sales he talked about Novell’s ZenWorks Configuration Manager.
Edge Hill has been using ZenWorks (Zen) for years now in some degree to deliver policy driven network applications to the staff and students desktop as well as enabling us to remote control users pc’s when they phone the IT helpdesk for support.
Historically the ZenWorks suite of applications has soley used Novell eDirectory for the storage of it’s configuration objects and polices. As Matt pointed out 60% of all ZenWorks customers (new and old) are now Microsoft only houses.
The big change in this release is that they have moved all the ZenWorks config into a SQL database (supported currently are Microsoft SQL Server with Oracle support coming in a later service pack expected Feb 2008). I would of liked to see that the other way round but thats my old faithfull Oracle DBA side coming through!
With the ZenWorks config out the way this leaves the user authentication to any supported LDAP directory, Novell eDirectory/Active Directory etc.
This move increases the market for the product greatly and they are hoping for a bigger adoption of ZenWorks suite across the board.
Some new features of the new version include:
- A single web Interface to configure the all parts of the ZenWorks system
- Microsoft Vista support for desktop management
- All communications between individual components now utilize the SOAP protocol and not NCP
- The software now updates itself from update repositories on the internet
- The software is more scalable as you can run individual components/tasks on separate dedicated servers as before one server did everything.
Next on the stage was Chris Hyde from Novell talking about the new features in Open Enterprise Server 2 on Linux. Basically this is the suite of Novell Services (File Storage/Printing/GroupWise Email/Cluster Services and eDirectory etc) running on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 platform.
You can see a big push from Novell now to get NetWare customers to migrate all the servers to the Linux platform. With this release of OES they are providing an optimized version of NetWare 6.5 that runs in the Xen virtual environment. There intention, that customers migrate to OES on Linux for new services and move there old NetWare boxes that they can’t do without and turn them into virtual machines. As an when they are ready customers can migrate there NetWare services to the Linux equivalents.
Die hard NetWare fans may see this as the end of NetWare but an advantage of virtualizing is that soon hardware support for the NetWare OS will no longer continue to exist but it will run happily on newer hardware for years to come under a virtual environment as it won’t know the difference!
One of the features arriving in OES 2 that I am excited about is DST, your thinking not another 3 letter acronym! This stands for ‘Dynamic Storage Technology’ and Novell are raving about this. Basically it allows customers to define policies to recognize active and stale data and automatically moves it to the appropriate storage device as the data’s status changes. You can use this to put active (more important) data on high-end storage devices such as your Netapp SAN for quick access with regular nightly backups and inactive or stale data (maybe data not accessing for months/years, or less business critical data such as MP3s, Images etc) can be moved automatically to the cheaper, slower storage that has a less regular backup schedule. This enables better use of your expensive storage hardware and reduces backup times and administration.
All this is seamless to you, the end user, you still only see one volume! For example a staff or students home directory (F: drive) appears the same as it always has even though some of your files may be stored on the cheaper kit whereas your important documents you update regularly are getting a nightly backup and can be accessed fast!
Once lunch was polished off, Matt again took the stage to discuss Novell Cluster Services for Linux. We have been using Cluster Services on NetWare for a couple of years now to run services such as GroupWise Email, Shared Directories and Home Directories, the University Intranet. In this session we were shown some tips ‘n tricks Salford Software have picked up from past projects at other institutions and how to successfully install and maintain a stable and highly available cluster of resources using OES 2 on Linux. This will be something we as a team will be looking at in the near future for sure.
As the day drew to a close and the bottles of mineral water were running at a premium Chris Hyde introduced the final demo about a product called ‘Sentinal from Novell’.
This is a security Information and Event Management solution that Novell have recently procured that gathers and correlates security and non-security information from across an organization’s networked infrastructure e.g User Login Failures, Password Changes, Firewall logs, Unix Syslogs, Windows event logs and server access logs. The list of devices and types of information it can gather is endless.
This product sucks in all the raw data from all your various sources and normalizes it into some kind of order to make sense of the data and turn it into useful information, you can then report on this or have it alert you to some event problem, e.g repeated unauthorized access from an IP address or user password failures from 2 geographical locations in close succession or server exploits. You can even get it to fire some work flow off, for example to disable a network account and email some admin user to tell them what has happened and who to deal with next.
As the IT Services department we deal with lots of different pieces of hardware and software ranging from network switches to LDAP servers to Finance Applications each of which has it’s own discrete logging mechanisms, this makes seeing the bigger picture alot more difficult but I can see uses for this software to pull in all this information into a central repository and allow us to report more easily across the whole range of systems…..This software does it all and could be overkill for Edge Hill but it’s at least food for thought!
I found the day very useful and informative and even though we may not get around to implementing all the software goodies mentioned in the near future we can at least find a use for the conference freebies!!!
July / August Update August 16, 2007
Posted by Paul Cheeseman in: General, Service Interruption, 1 commentTags: Access-Manager, GO, novell, shibboleth, UK Federation
It’s been a while since my last post so I thought I’d add a quick update. Edge Hill has now joined the UK Federation, we are due to install our Shibboleth server in the next two weeks. We have some challenges ahead of us in the next few weeks. The biggest of these challenges is providing services during the scheduled site wide power outages in September. Another big challenge will be the implementation of Novell’s Access Manager, this will form part of the new GO portal that is currently being developed by the Web Services Team. We are also due to draw up some hardware specifications for the VMware project. September will see an on-site trial of the Sun Ray client devices.
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.
