Information Technology

We’re just about ready to launch our new library cataloging and circulation system, Evergreen Open-ILS.  This project has been in the works since August, and has been my primary focus for the past few weeks.

While preparing to “go live”, the library staff and I have collaborated using a dokuwiki-based shared workspace to tracking issues and final to-do lists.  This has also become the primary location for all project and system related documentation.  I’ve made it a personal goal to provide readable, straightforward documentation accessible to technical people without a prior knowledge of the library system.

This project is just one more example of WJU adopting an enterprise-class open-source solution to meet technical needs.  Moodle (online and hybrid course delivery), Drupal (our public website), and Wordpress (this site) are core services provided to students, faculty, staff, and the general public.  In the near future, we plan to move our Intranet system on to the Drupal platform.

In most cases, we’ve found the flexibility of FOSS both tremendously useful and painfully tedious.  While the ability to tailor a product for our specific needs has proven itself worthwhile, we’ve also spent many hours adapting software to our environment.  Thankfully, we have supportive management and talented folks (like Rob Ryan) committed to implementing excellent technical solutions.

We have a new mascot.  Thanks Santa!

After a network reconfiguration, a few students reported trouble connecting to XBox Live.  In particular, the XBox 360 diagnostic console would report an MTU error.  Because of this, I setup a Microsoft Xbox Live approved test for MTU size and logged the results.

Since 10/20/08, the test was executed every two minutes on the res hall network. It reported errors for only 6 of the 24,000+ attempts. This seems to indicate that our network does not have an inherent problem with MTU settings.

The fact that some students do occasionally experience this issue makes me wonder if there is a localized issue possibly caused by multiple concurrent XBox Live connections or other substantial network traffic on one switch.

I’ve been pleased with the excellent product quality at our coffee shop this year.  Now if only I could purchase a monthly “subscription” and eliminate all that paper money nonsense.

I met yesterday with our Registrar, Tina Petersen for a couple of hours to discuss the possibility of digitizing a number of official-use forms.  After drawing up a list of target forms for the project, we had excellent discussion about several methods we could use to manage the information electronically (ASP/MS-SQL for some forms, Adobe PDF + LiveCycle for others).

It seems like we keep running into the tension between:

• Security and Ease of Access
• Temporary, Inexpensive Workarounds and Permanent, High-$$$ Solutions

Not just in this project, but in many things that the university aspires to accomplish.  In this case, the two questions are “How much do we build our own system, considering that a brand-new student information system will already do these things for us?”, and “How do we ensure authenticity for digital signatures without undue account management overhead?”.

IT has desperately needed a solid knowledgebase… and we might just be getting one!

I’m exploring dokuwiki (http://www.dokuwiki.org) as a possible solution.  We could be taking better advantage of our time by documenting common solutions, and Dokuwiki meets our primary requirements:

• Simple interface for creating content
• Provides password-protection for internal-use content
• Integrated indexing and search
• Core wiki features (revision control, comments on changes, multi-user)

The next step is to move this site to a public server…

Note to Mac users:  If we added DNS entries to your laptop, you may remove those now.

As our students are well aware, there was an issue with the Rocklin wireless network affecting Mac users.  For those of you that are interested in the problem (and the solution), here’s the details.  I’ll break this into three parts:

Part A:  Additional Bandwidth = Network Reconfiguration

Recently we purchased an additional 10Mbit downstream connection from our ISP (Surewest).  This more than doubled our available capacity, as we previously provided a single 6Mbit connection for the entire Rocklin campus.

The 10Mbit connection is allocated solely to our students through A) the wireless network and B) the wired network jacks in the Residence Halls.  Faculty and staff users do not have access to this network segment; all traffic generated is from students.  This change was made as part of our campaign to improve the overall Internet experience for our university users.

Part B:  Network Reconfiguration = DNS Reconfiguration

Now, we’ll start to get more technical:  Several network resources (our Intranet page, Moodle, the Helpdesk ticket system) are hosted on a local web server.  When the wireless network and admin/staff shared one internet connection, clients on the wireless network could directly access those resources through our internal LAN.  Therefore, DNS was configured to provide internal IP addresses for these resources.

With the new separation of wireless traffic, wireless users must use the external IP address of our local web server.  On Monday, our network consultant made the appropriate changes enabling access to internal resources for wireless users.

Part C:  Macs Don’t Like Lots of DNS Servers!

In part B, we stepped on Mac users’ toes by telling DHCP to distribute five different DNS servers to each client.  Apparently this was not a problem for Windows-based computers.  I worked on a few Mac laptops Tuesday morning, and saw the same problem again and again.  The first three DNS servers were internal only, used to load our wireless logon page, and would not resolve external addresses (google.com, for example). 

Rather than trying the external servers specified at positions #4 and #5, the Mac would simply give up.  The user could not access any website beyond the wireless logon page.  Our solution was to eliminate all but two DNS servers in our DHCP configuration.

Thanks for your patience with us, and thanks for letting us know that there was a problem.  We’re improving our project implementation process to avoid future situations like this.  Sometimes even the best-laid plans fail… at least for Macs.

Apparently I needed to modify the order of my VirtualHosts sections.  After moving my VirtualHost containing a wildcard ServerAlias entry ( *.jessupblogs.com ) further down the httpd.conf file, and a few other minor tweaks, things are fully operational.

Now, on to installing Wordpress modules!  The “Role Manager” looks promising.  There is also a cool sounding “Wordpress IDS” based on PHPIDS.  The University supports online courses through Moodle.  I wonder if PHPIDS could be used in conjunction with Moodle?  A number of sites have been hit recently with a straightforward exploit simple enough for almost any motivated student to execute.  Security is a significant concern, especially when sensitive academic information is at stake.

Finally, our wireless network hit a roadbump today.  It would seem that some further networking configuration is necessary in order to provide our users with access to an internal webserver…  We’ll be working on this first thing tomorrow morning.

This is a much more detailed post than I intended to write.  Blogging is just so much fun!

We are facing an interesting challenge with our new blogging site configuration.  Our new jessupblogs.com website is going to function in two key roles:

• http://departmentblog.jessupblogs.com/
• http://faculty.jessupblogs.com/faculty_member_name/

After installing Wordpress into two different subdirectories, I’m at the point of tweaking Apache’s virtual hosts manually.  We had a problem that tanked the Apache server for all of our public websites… bad, very bad.  After troubleshooting, we found the culprit - an include statement with a non-existent target.

I was very excited to learn that Wordpress can share its two “users” database tables with a second Wordpress installation.  This is the setup we are using for now, and it looks great.

I appreciate the efforts the University has been making towards intentional project management.  Plus, I’ve had the opportunity to work with our web and graphics guy, Rob Ryan.  What a great experience its been!