Email and collaboration tools

Dartmouth’s Council on Computing has constituted a task force to determine Dartmouth’s requirements for future email and collaboration tools. Thayer School’s Director of Computing Services is on the task force and seeks your thoughts on the subject.

Hard drive based back up server

We are a “belt and suspenders” computing staff. To reflect our paranoia of making sure all your ThayerFS data is safe, we’re adding another layer of redundancy to our data back up plan. We just started setting up a new “online backup server”. It consists of fifteen 1 Terabyte hard drives which we’ll use to back up ThayerFS. This system will eventually be located off-site. We’ll continue to use our tape library which will be located in yet another off-site location.

Weather station and Solar Panel monitoring

We’re in the middle of a project to get a weather station installed on the roof of Murdough. We’ll be using the same system to monitor the output of the Solar Panels which are already installed on the roof. The plan is to make the data available on the web for those interested in local conditions and for research purposes.

Spanos lighting improvements

We have been working with our building manager and FO&M to add special lights to properly illuminate presenters. This should improve the quality of our lecture capture video and should reduce the harsh shadows the current lighting causes on the speaker’s face.

A/V system improvements, documentation, and repairs

Collaborating with Instrument Room personnel, we have been working for some time now to make our classroom and meeting room audio visual systems more user-friendly. This includes simplification of touch screen controls or even their replacement with pushbutton controls, enhanced documentation about how to use the systems, improved image quality in Spanos and C200, a combination white board/projector screen in M210, additional microphone options, improved/repaired audio, etc. Some of these improvements are finished, but we still have a long way to go on others.

New Intel compiler available

We purchased two floating licenses of Intel Fortran and C++ compilers for Linux. They are available on any of our Linux clients or compute servers. Also included with these licenses are the MKL and IPP libraries.

For more information about these new compilers and how to use them, please see our Linux Services page.

New lab computers

In the next few months, we plan to deploy new lab computers for the Linux lab in Cummings and to replace the ten oldest computers in MacLean 210.

Adobe Contribute rollout soonish

We’ve purchased licenses of Adobe Contribute, which will allow the Thayer Community to create and edit web pages in a simple WYSIWYG editor. The experience is similar to a word processor. If you are interested in using this software, please contact us.

Vista planning

While we’re content with Windows XP, Windows Vista is an inevitability as XP support is dropped by Microsoft. We’re going to start looking at the best way to image and deploy Vista on lab, desktop, and laptop computers.

Blade servers

We recently took delivery of a new blade chassis and some new blade servers. The chassis can accommodate up to 16 servers. The preliminary plan is to replace our aging babylon compute cluster with a couple of blades. This will reduce space, electricity, cooling, and administration time, while increasing the computing power over our current cluster. We’ll have several empty slots available for faculty with research projects that need extra computer power.

Condor High Throughput Computing

We’re investigating the use of Condor High Throughput Computing on our linux clusters. This would allow the Thayer community to submit compute jobs and have them distributed automatically to our compute clusters.

Currently, we are testing this on our limited-access sisyphus cluster, but hope to roll it out to an upgraded babylon cluster after the Spring term. Jobs run on either cluster will be able to use the other cluster’s CPUs if they are available.

Hardy Heron is coming…

The new version of Ubuntu, version 8.04 (hardy heron), is scheduled to be released at the end of April. This new release features many enhancements to the version we’re currently running on our linux clients, and is also the next of Ubuntu’s “long-term release” versions, which will get security updates for a longer period of time than their other versions.

We have been alpha (and now beta) testing this to ensure that any bugs related to our systems are reported and corrected prior to its official release. We plan to upgrade the Cummings 227 linux lab with the new version (and new computers, too!) after the Spring term. We will also be in touch with faculty and staff who have linux clients to schedule their upgrades.

ThayerCups server upgrade

We just upgraded the CUPS print server that handles print jobs from Mac and Linux clients. There should not be any change in the way you print from these platforms.  The new server is now easier to back up.

Application Virtualization

We are testing, “Application Virtualization”, a new technique for encapsulating applications to ease deployment to lab computers and client computers.

Atrium Help Desk continues

We continue to hold our “Atrium Help Desk” from 3:00-4:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Come by the atrium if you have any computing-related questions.

AMANDA approaches backups by using native programs such as postfix, tar, dump, xfsdump, etc within a client/server relationship. The catalog database is store in flat tar.gz files instead of a more complicated (but perhaps more scalable) database such as MySQL. AMANDA’s claim to fame is its scheduler. You tell AMANDA you backup cycle (say 30 days), the set of clients/directories/files you want to backup, and she takes it from there, automatically balancing backups (both full and incremental) throughout that time period. While this is great for load balancing, as I understand it, the administrator is only guaranteed that backups will happen during the cycle, not exactly when those backups will happen. AMANDA is also very fast. In my testing (two Dell PE2850 machines running Ubuntu over Gig-E networking with an IBM LTO-3 tape drive) the backup averaged ~50 MB/s between the client (to the holding disk) and then ~77 MB/s from holding disk to tape. Where AMANDA shows her age is dealing with tape libraries. The only way I have found to handle a tape library with more than one drive (ours has four) is to create separate AMANDA configurations, each with its own tape drive and set of slots in the library. This negates much of the smart scheduling AMANDA provides, as you have to manually balance which directories/file to backup in each AMANDA configuration. Another gotcha with AMANDA is the inability to append data to tapes. Overall, AMANDA is simple and fast, but makes coping with a large tape library somewhat cumbersome.

Bacula is a holistic backup solution. Everything needed to use Bacula is included with Bacula. Bacula is implemented with a client/server relationship, using its own protocols and your choice of MySQL, PostgeSQL, or SQLite to store the catalog in. Scheduling is done in the standard fashion of telling the program what days/weeks/months you want fulls and incrementals to occur. Bacula handles tape libraries very well, allowing multiple tape drives to co-exist in a single configuration. Performance is adequate. Using the same hardware and OS as in the AMANDA tests. The same backup (~90 GB) that was used in the AMANDA tests averaged ~30 MB/s from client to holding disk, and then ~63 MB/s from holding disk to tape. Overall Bacula provides a slick program, great documentation and support for advanced features, at the price of some speed.

In conclusion, AMANDA and Bacula are both excellent programs, with different strengths. From my research, the difference in network speed between AMANDA and Bacula is due to Bacula pumping everything through one TCP port, while AMANDA fires up several dumpers, using many TCP ports to transfer the data. When backup up more than one client, the aggregate speed Bacula provides increases.