June 20, 2008 -- Volume 5 -- Number 1
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Welcome to the eleventh occasional "CS Staff Gazette" -- a roundup
of announcements and status from the CS Staff. In this issue:
* Machine Room (Room 218) Infrastructure
* Research Co-lo Center (Room 002) Infrastructure
* Summer Work (E-mail, Web Architecture)
* Maple
* Dial-up Discontinued
* Proofpoint Appliance
* Room 401 Projector
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* Machine Room (Room 218) Infrastructure
Over the past year, we had outgrown the power capacity in room 218
on a couple of different levels. First, we were at 90% capacity
on the UPS; second, we were effectively out of outlets in several
of our racks. Last week, facilities completed the installation
of a larger UPS. Due to what turned out to be a completely
avoidable problem on the part of the UPS installer, we were dark
for 36 hours rather than 8 hours. The good news is that we are
at only 25% of the power capacity on the new unit and we have 50%
more circuit breaker space in the room. Now that there are
additional outlets available to us, we will be replacing several
of our low-density racks with higher-density racks. This will
take place during early morning downtimes this summer.
* Research Co-lo Center (Room 002) Infrastructure
Work continues on converting Room 002 into a co-lo (co-location)
facility for research projects. If you have not been following the
progress, a single door has been replaced by a double door, a new
air handler has been plumbed into the building chilled water and the
UPS that was in room 218 has been moved to 002. Once the air
handler and the relocated UPS are brought online in the next few
weeks, the room will have power and cooling capacity for 7 fully
populated equipment racks plus 1 switching rack. The funding for
both the 218 and 002 work is shared between the University (50%),
SEAS (25%), and CS (25%).
* Summer Work (E-mail, Web Architecture)
Summer is a busy time for CS Staff and this year is no exception.
Some of our most significant work is to address functional and
performance limitations of both our web and e-mail infrastructure.
Due to the current architecture of our web infrastructure, it is
difficult to respond to flash crowds (e.g., hot CITP publications),
to upgrade components (e.g., PHP versions), or to replace hardware
without major disruption. This summer, we will install an
application-layer switch which will let us balance web traffic
seamlessly across multiple servers as well as gracefully upgrade
components or replace hardware.
The e-mail infrastructure will undergo a major overhaul this
summer. Our current implementation suffers from performance
problems, functional limitations, and a poor web interface. The
performance problems are due both to aging hardware and to the
fact that the imap server uses NFS to mount the file system that
holds mail folders. The primary functional limitation we see now
is that mail folders can get out-of-sync when more than one client
for a given user is connected. In this day of always-connected
iPhones, what was a minor annoyance has become a significant
limitation. Our new architecture will be based on Zimbra (though
not every bell and whistle will be deployed). The Zimbra-based
system will be load-balanced across multiple servers for
significantly improved performance. In addition, it will have a
modern web interface that supports such features as message tagging
and searching. While there will be a specific cut-over date where
e-mail will be delivered to the new system rather than the old,
there will be a transition period (before and after the cut-over)
where users will be able to access both systems. This will give
users time to become familiar with the new system and to move
archived mail from the old system into the new system. We will
announce the cut-over date and provide detailed information in the
coming weeks.
* Maple
In January, we upgraded Maple to version 11.0 (from version 5).
Maple is a symbolic Math package and is available on all our
compute servers.
* Dial-up Discontinued
On February 4, 2008, CS Staff permanently disconnected the dial-up
service to the department. We transitioned the last major user to
DSL and are now avoiding hundreds of dollars per month in phone
line charges.
* Proofpoint Appliance
On April 14, 2008, we upgraded our Proofpoint spam filtering system
to version 5.0. This both stabilized and sped up Proofpoint,
improved its filtering, and provided a new login capability so that
users can check the contents of their quarantine without waiting
for a daily digest. The login page uses your unix username/password
and is available here: https://pps.cs.princeton.edu:10020/
* Room 401 Projector
While this is old news by now, Room 401 has a new projector! By
placing the screen to the side of the blackboard, instructors can
now simultaneously use the blackboard while giving a laptop-based
presentation.