ITPG Meeting Notes September 15, 2008

Present: Arlene Allen, Jeffrey Barteet, Sean Bennett, David Bosso, Ted Cabeen, Beverly Colgate, Mark Dotson, Doug Drury, Ann Dundon, Kirk Grier, Aaron Martin, Mark McGilvray, Elise Meyer, Steve Miley, Bruce Miller, Alan Moses, Mark Probert, Tom Putnam, Andy Satomi, Glenn Schiferl, Deborah Scott, Jan Smith, Chris Sneathen, Jamie Sonsini, Jim Woods.

Update on CMS (Steve Miley)

Last week the EVC sent out a note indicating that the Course Management System effort was going to focus on moodle. This decision was largely due to finances: moodle is less expensive to operate, and PHP/MySQL programming efforts are easier to staff. The CMS service is going to be branded “GauchoSpace”. The primary effort for this quarter is to migrate the users from the LSCF, ID, and CS moodle servers over to GauchoSpace, and to migrate the Sakai users to GauchoSpace, and to provide training. Funding has been committed for a minimal one-year budget, and is now being collected. In addition ID has contributed $30K for hardware upgrades. The new equipment will be hosted in the Life Sciences Building, with a backup server in IS&C in North Hall. The GauchoSpace (or CMS) service currently has 215 courses and 36,000 students in its database (only 20,000 of the students are active.) During the fall only 20 new faculty can be accommodated. The service needs a faculty oversight committee to provide guidance for feature support and development.

It was pointed out that this is not a full campus service, thus there is high risk for the institution if faculty and students rely on it as such.

However there is some rich functionality, in that our team has added automatic section integration, which no one else in the moodle community has appeared to have done. More work needs to be done on performance monitoring.

So far feedback from the faculty regarding the decision to go with moodle appears to be positive: faculty are happy that a decision has been made, Sakai users indicate that they will find a way to do what they need to do in moodle; moodle has the advantage of offering a more structured layout. One big hurdle was getting the automatic section integration working with moodle, since that means that Sakai users won’t lose that functionality.

Staffing support continues to be an issue: 1 FTE is needed to do system administration, performance monitoring & programming, and another 1 FTE is needed to do CMS administration. A small budget for hardware would also be helpful.

The College of Letters & Sciences is exploring a college-wide course materials fee that would provide funding for CMS, instructional facilities, and classroom technology. The next step is for the proposed fee to be reviewed by the Letters & Science executive committee in October.

Update on CISO Search / RUAC IP Address Charge (Tom Putnam)

There is an offer out for the first campus CISO, and we are hopeful.

As this group is aware, having a CISO and Security Program are requirements of UC Business and Finance Bulletin IS-3, and these have also been called out in two audits. In Spring 2007 the ITB recommended that a CISO and Information Security Analyst (ISA) be funded by a RUAC fee increase. We submitted a proposal to the Income Rate & Recharge committee on 9/5 with a fee increase that was subsidized by our reserve. (We have built up a reserve of over $500K due to salary savings and built-in contingency). The IR&R Committee recommended that we start the consultation with the campus by proposing an increase of $2.50 for a total fee of $13.50/IP address/year. The unsubsidized fee would be $28.00/IP address/year. Charging by IP Address allows departments to “game the system” by installing NAT boxes to avoid this fee; however, this just shifts the costs around campus. The Income & Recharge Committee recommended that we look into switching to a Communications Worker or FTE for the future.

Comments included that the unsubsidized fee would be a significant cost increase to departments. How does one discourage individual groups from trying to avoid these costs? We can’t enforce the non-use of NAT boxes, and we don’t currently plan to count hosts behind them. The Network Citizenship Document requires that network administrators be able to identify who was on their network up to a month, which precludes NAT boxes. There was a recommendation that a service description be included with notice of the billing.

Emergency Provisions for the UCSB Home Page (Elise Meyer)

Following the experience of the Gap Fire, Ron Cortez, Paul Desruisseaux, George Foulsham, and Tom Putnam met to discuss how to better provide information during emergencies via the UCSB home page. The result was to form a team consisting of Ann Dundon, Kevin Schmidt, and Daniel Youngberg, led by Elise Meyer, to accomplish the following functional objectives:

1. The home page server needs to have uninterruptible power with generator backup and refueling during an extended emergency.
2. All emergency information needs to be located on the home page server. (A pointer to content on another server may be inaccessible during an emergency.)
3. In case the primary home page server becomes inaccessible, a backup server needs to be located at an off-site location that is unlikely to be affected by a regional emergency such as an earthquake or a large fire. The UCOP data center in Oakland is suggested as the backup location.
1. The content of the primary server needs to be continuously updated on the backup server so the backup can function immediately if needed.
2. A mechanism needs to be implemented that automatically redirects traffic to the backup server when the primary server becomes inaccessible.
3. Some off-campus people need to be designated and trained to update information on the server in case people in Santa Barbara can’t access it.
4. Activation, publication, and editing of emergency information needs to be possible without technical knowledge (i.e., no HTML). In particular, the Office of Public Affairs will normally be responsible for content of the web site, and they will have several people who will be authorized to update the web site to reduce dependence on any single person.
5. Two different “levels of severity” should be considered. When an authorized person activates the emergency content, they would be given the choice of low versus high severity. The intent in the low severity case is to avoid overemphasis of the emergency and disruption of normal activity.
1. In the low severity case where the University is not seriously affected but there is something going on in the region like the Gap Fire, the normal web page would have an added link to emergency information, possibly using red text to highlight the link.
2. In the high severity case where the University is seriously affected, the normal web page would be replaced with an emergency web page as the first page. This presentation is intended to emphasize the emergency information and then link off to normal content if someone desires.
6. Emergency information could be organized in two different formats:
1. A blog could be used to enter periodic updates. Every entry would be time- and date-stamped so people could tell how current it is.
2. A set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) could complement the blog. Here are some sample questions that came to the telephone operators during the Gap Fire:
• Is the campus closed today?
• Do we have power?
• Are classes still going on?
• Are campus tours still being scheduled?
• Is the [fire/fill in emergency here] affecting the campus at all?
• What local streets or highways are blocked off?
• How is the air quality?
• Are any conferences affected?
• Will today's/tonight's Campbell Hall [insert Hall/Theater here] program go on as scheduled?

The team identified two process issues that needed to be addressed at a level above the technical implementation:

1. The EOC needs to provide content to the web updaters.
2. Is there a circumstance where the web updaters initiate content without specific information from the EOC? For example, if UCOP notices that UCSB is off the air, and they are aware that there has been some emergency in the region, do they provide that basic information?

It was noted that the EOC needs repetitive training to get better at dealing with emergencies. It was also noted that the Emer-L mailing list is currently set up so that only authorized individuals may post to that list.

Update on BEG Communications Infrastructure Standards Project (Elise Meyer)

The BEG is having weekly meetings (Fridays at 10:00 a.m. in Broida 3032) to review the technical details of the Communications Infrastructure standards. Our current discussions included the recommendation that in buildings that have generator power, standby power is required for the Communications Equipment Room, and conduit to support future standby power is required in Terminal Rooms, but the actual installation of standby power is only recommended in Terminal Rooms. You are welcome to join us in our review and discussion.

9/14 Power Outage issues (All)

The biggest complaint about the outage was the impact on network connectivity of having North Hall without generator power. Some buildings with generator power are connected to the backbone via North Hall; while they were up, the network connection beyond their building wasn’t. This resulted in isolation for some; for organizations with multiple building locations, part of their network was cut off. There was also a question of whether there were plans to have duplex directories in order to provide directory service during North Hall outages. The answer was that there are currently no plans to do this; however, Instructional Computing will start running a Student Directory that is in parallel to the Campus Enterprise Directory. Prior accommodation was made to allow parents to pay tuition bills (this would only work for parents who logged in via parent/pin) and significant payments were made during the outage window.

On our campus where the effectiveness of local power and cooling infrastructure is affected by the existence of central power and cooling infrastructure, the question was raised whether it made sense to invest in one without there being investment in the other. It was suggested that the best way to address this issue was to discuss priorities and do a risk assessment. In the case of the Student Health Center, if there is an unexpected event and Student Health needs access to medical records, there are plans in place to move equipment around to make them available.