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Report of the Information Technology Syndicate on the University Computing Service for 1994-95
Contents
Introduction
IT Fund
The Computing Service
Network
Granta Backbone Network
JANET and SuperJANET
Cambridge University Data Network
Network-related services
Electronic Mail
Information Services
Centrally-managed services
IBM Mainframe Service
Public Workstation Facility
Central Unix Service
User Administration
Printer Spooling
Data archive
Advanced Computing
Support services
Unix and VMS Support
Support for Purchases of Personal Systems
External Hardware Maintenance
Software Sales
Printing and Reproduction Service
Advice and consultancy
Consultancy
Help Desk
Sidgwick Site Support Team
Training
Directorate and liaison
Institution Liaison
Introduction
1. The main remits of the Information Technology Syndicate are to develop computing policy for the University and the Colleges and to supervise the University Computing Service. The present report covers the work of the Syndicate and the Service during the 1994-95 academic year, with a narrative which extends to December 1995. A Statistical Annex giving details of certain services down to the level of individual institutions has been circulated to various University bodies and to Colleges; further copies are available from the University Registry. This statistical information relates to a mixture of centrally funded and charged services and is intended only to give a general picture of what the Service has done; it is not sufficiently comprehensive or detailed to provide a meaningful attribution of Service costs.
2. Dr Mike Sayers was appointed Director of the Computing Service from 4 November 1994, having been Acting Director since Dr David Hartley's resignation at the end of March; his former position of Deputy Director (Technical) was subsequently converted into two junior graduate posts. The migration of users and data from the Phoenix/MVS mainframe service to other facilities was successfully completed by the scheduled closing date of September 1. In other respects, the IT Syndicate and the Service continued to operate within the framework of the 1993 report of the Review of Academic Computing, which the General Board is expected to complete considering during the current academic year.
IT Fund
3. In Michaelmas 1994 the General Board implemented that part of the Review report which called for the establishment of an IT Fund to support strategic computing and IT developments in Faculties and Departments. The Board and the Syndicate agreed guidelines for the operation of the fund which inter alia gave priority to bids involving networking and/or teaching projects; the Syndicate established an IT Needs Committee to assess the bids and two rounds of funding have now been completed, for 1994-95 and 1995-96. Allocations from the IT Fund have enabled useful projects to get off the ground in each School and in other institutions including the University Library and the Computing Service and its existence has undoubtedly caused many departments to think carefully about their IT strategy and encouraged a certain degree of standardisation. Whether the mismatch between the total of bids meeting the guidelines and the funds available for distribution justified the work put into generating bids is more debatable. The Syndicate will shortly be making recommendations to the Board about the future of the IT Fund.
The Computing Service
4. The Computing Service provides services of several kinds. Some of these, including University-wide networking and network-related services such as electronic mail, can only be provided in a corporate fashion. Other centrally-managed services, including the Public Workstation Facility (PWF) and the Central Unix Service (CUS), may be used by any member of the University with a need for them but offer similar facilities to those which some institutions provide in-house for a more restricted clientele. These are complemented by services which support institutional and individually-owned facilities ranging from local area networks and personal computers to powerful multi-user computers and scientific workstations. Finally, the Service provides advice and consultancy services including a Help Desk and also training courses which span all types of facility.
5. The Computing Service is organised into 5 divisions, three of which are primarily concerned with providing centrally-managed facilities and specialised technical support and two which are concerned respectively with supporting individual users and institutions.
The Network division looks after the University Data Network (CUDN) and the Granta Backbone Network (GBN), and provides support for institutional networking
The Systems and Development division is responsible for the PWF and related support and for electronic mail
The Systems and Unix division runs the CUS and provides Unix and VAX/VMS support to institutions
The User Services division runs the Help Desk and provides general technical support to individual users, and is responsible for software, hardware and documentation sales, printing and reception
The Institution Liaison division maintains contact with Heads of Department and other senior staff concerning institutional IT strategies and related matters.
6. The following table gives the estimated post-Phoenix cost of each of the individual services which the Computing Service provides, with the previous year's figures in italics. All expenditure is included, whether funded centrally or by means of cost recovery from charged user services, which produce in total roughly £0.75M per year.
1995 (£K) 1994 (£K)
Service Staff Other Total % Total %
Network 499 419 918 23.6% 799 21.8%
Network-related 143 37 180 4.6% 152 4.1%
PWF 245 229 474 12.2% 277 7.6%
CUS 167 133 293 7.7% 259 7.1%
Other centrally-run facilities 114 50 164 4.1% *482 13.0%
Support services 396 324 720 18.5% 624 17.0%
Advice & consultancy 462 51 513 13.2% 474 12.9%
Directorate & liaison 250 123 373 9.6% 302 8.2%
Administration & overheads 142 114 256 6.6% 303 8.2%
TOTAL 2,418 1,479 3,897 100.0% 3,672 100.0%
The following paragraphs discuss each of the services in turn.
Network
Granta Backbone Network
7. The Computing Service continued to be responsible to the Granta Backbone Network Management Committee for all GBN operations. The initial plan for the GBN was completed with the installation of ducts and cables on the route from Christ's College to Sidney Sussex and on to Jesus College. Data communication uses of the GBN again predominated and are discussed in the following paragraphs. The use of private GBN fibres by Colleges and other institutions to connect physically separate sites also continued to increase and fibres were used for the first time to carry security camera pictures back to the University's central control room. Additional copper cables were installed in the GBN ducts for voice network use. Further details of GBN operations are contained in the annual report of the GBN Management Committee.
JANET and SuperJANET
8. The 10 Mbit/s connection to BT's Switched Multimegabit Data Service continued to carry all the JANET IP Service traffic between Cambridge and the rest of the Internet. Like most academic sites, Cambridge suffered from the shortage of capacity on international links, especially to the USA; the relevant national organisations have been working very hard on this, but with only limited success. The 34 Mbit/s SuperJANET links to the other sites in the pilot project were heavily used, especially for video-conferencing and for the Insurrect project for the remote teaching of surgery, which is now in its second year of full operation and has six user institutions taking part in its twice weekly sessions. In February, the SuperJANET link was used in a collaboration involving several local companies to demonstrate video-on-demand to a meeting of the Parliamentary IT Committee at Imperial College. Towards the end of the year, BT installed the new Synchronous Digital Hierarchy equipment, which will allow Cambridge to participate in the SuperJANET IP/ATM pilot project to provide much higher peak bandwidths for IP traffic.
Cambridge University Data Network
9. The table below gives numbers of CUDN connections of various kinds at the end of 1994-95 (with end 1993-94 figures in italics). The previous trend for the use of X.25 and asynchronous options to decline and for new institutional installations to consist of a local area network linked by ethernet to the CUDN intensified, not least because of School-based initiatives in the arts, humanities and social sciences, while by the end of the year practically every College had an ethernet connection. Although the number of asynchronous lines fell sharply, there are still a significant number in use; to continue supporting them after the end of Phoenix, it was necessary to install new equipment and to develop the appropriate software.
University Data Network
Asynchronous X.25 Ethernet
University 363 632 63 79 64 47
Colleges 22 56 12 19 28 11
External 10 37 1 4 10 7
TOTAL 395 725 76 102 102 65
10. An eighth area router, on the Mill Lane site, was added to the network of routers linked by GBN fibres which provides the CUDN filtered ethernet service; it is planned to install a ninth on the Old Addenbrooke's Site. Equipment was purchased and tested for a pilot Asynchronous Transfer Mode backbone link between the New Museums Site and New Addenbrooke's. The Magpie fast modem service, which was released for general Telnet use in January 1995, with a SLIP service following in October, proved very popular and by November 1995 had over 1,000 registered users, with fifteen modems in use at 14.4 Kbit/s and an upgrade to 28.8 Kbit/s planned. Following the production of new JANET Acceptable Use Guidelines which place much more emphasis on compliance with individual institutional policies, an Authorisation for the Use of the CUDN was produced, which sets out the conditions users must abide by if they wish to have a network connection.
11. The developments described above involved Network division staff in a very large amount of installation activity, whether carrying out the work themselves or supervising the work of external contractors. While the total income from installation costs charged out to users during the 1994-95 financial year increased to over £360,000, the staff are to be warmly congratulated on bringing the installation backlog down to as little as one month at times outside the Long Vacation period of peak demand.
12. Staff from both the Network and Institutional Liaison divisions again spent much time providing advice to institutions on how to wire up buildings, establish local area networks and connect them to the CUDN. IT Fund allocations provided the cost of networking equipment in a number of cases, particularly within the School of Biological Sciences. Many departments sought to take advantage of the General Board's decision to allow the cost of major wiring installations to be met from the Minor Works Fund and this unfortunately led to a considerable backlog, mostly within EMBS, at the planning and funding stages.
Network-related services
Electronic Mail
13. The Computing Service operates two electronic mail (email) facilities, the central switch which routes all email coming into Cambridge to the appropriate destination and the Hermes networked message store. During the year, two modern processors were added to the mail switch; one of its two older machines has already been decommissioned and the other will follow as soon as the phasing out of local support for the Coloured Book Protocols has been completed. In December 1994, the software used to send and deliver email on Hermes was changed from PP to Smail, dramatically reducing the maintenance requirement. In October 1995, the large increase in the load on Hermes as all the pre-registered students began to use email at once produced severe congestion, which was cured by changes to the software configuration and the installation of additional main memory. At this point, the member of staff directly responsible for all email support had just left at short notice; we are extremely grateful to one of his colleagues from Unix Support for coming to the rescue.
Information Services
14. Having a new member of staff to work full time on information provision enabled the provision of printed information to be brought up-to-date for the first time in several years. In January 1995, a start was made on moving data from the Gopher server to the World Wide Web (WWW) server and by October the latter was fully functional. Many documents from the Press Office and Publicity Unit have been installed on the WWW server and new press announcements are included as a matter of course. In response to many email requests from potential students, the Board of Graduate Studies have made the postgraduate prospectus available for installation. Email queries in response to our Web entries have ranged from 'what is my friend's e-mail address' to 'who invented Cambridge University and why'; the inclusion of an email directory during the year has reduced the need for the first of these.
15. Accesses to the Gopher server continued to increase up to March 1995 (when there were 17,000 connections from 1,000 computers within the University and 5,500 elsewhere on the Internet) and then declined steadily as WWW became the dominant information server technology throughout the Internet, encompassing tens of thousands of servers around the world, including about 40 run by University and College institutions. Use of the WWW server shot up from 20,000 requests during September 1994 (originating from 250 University computers and 1,200 elsewhere) to 170,000 requests in September 1995 (from 1,500 and 13,000 respectively); in each case roughly half the total number of requests came from within the University. The central WWW and Gopher servers were moved to a new hardware system during the summer of 1995.
16. The USENET news server continued to increase in popularity, reaching 190,000 connections per month (around 18% from the CUS, the remainder from more than 1,400 computers in over 80 University and College institutions) and over 160 news-reading connections at peak times; these are roughly double the figures from last year. More than 5,600 newsgroups are now available, including over 150 local ones which provide a forum for discussion and the dissemination of information within the University. By the end of the year, the volume of news articles from around the world reached 7.8 GB per month (or over 2,750,000 individual articles). The news server's article disc storage was substantially increased in June 1995 and, following a series of very disruptive disc failures between August and October, data "mirroring" was introduced to minimise the impact of future incidents.
Centrally-managed services
IBM Mainframe Service
17. The Phoenix/MVS service on the IBM 3084Q mainframe closed down as scheduled on the morning of 1 September 1995, marking the end of over 23 years of IBM-based computing at Cambridge. In its last months the service was on the whole very lightly loaded, as individual applications and their users transferred in stages to the PWF and the CUS, although a few users made the most of the opportunity to carry out some large computations. Because of this atypical pattern of use, no figures for the Phoenix/MVS service have been included in the Statistical Annex.
Public Workstation Facility
18. This year, enhancements to the Public Workstation Facility concentrated on improving the servers and the networking software rather than on adding to the more than 200 PC and Macintosh seats in its various clusters. By early 1995, it was clear that new software developments would make it impossible for users to manage much longer with the then standard allocation of 5 MB of disc storage. To avoid this becoming a major constraint on future use of the PWF, funding for an additional 32 GB of storage on RAID discs was sought and obtained from the IT Fund; unfortunately, problems with procurement prevented any of it being brought into service until the Christmas vacation. Over the summer of 1995, the Sidgwick applications server was re-organised and those at Physics and Chemistry were upgraded in conjunction with the provision of additional seats by those departments.
19. Although the installation of Novell Netware Release 4 could not take place as planned during the summer of 1995 it has been re-scheduled for next Long Vacation. Since the pre-registration of all undergraduates on the PWF means that there may at times be large numbers of inactive users, code was installed to migrate them out of the Novell bindery and so speed up a number of operating system processes. In addition to the PWF clusters in University locations, a charged service is provided which enables PWF-like workstations in Colleges to have tunnelled access to the applications software on the PWF and at three other University sites (Economics, Chemical Engineering and the University Library). There were 8 Colleges in this "PWFClub" during 1994-95, but the number has since increased to 13.
20. For the first time, reliable information has been available on the use of the PWF by individuals and several tables and graphs are to be found in the Statistical Annex. Because the PWF is heavily used for teaching and undergraduates are registered as members of their Colleges, the total use by the latter was on a par with that by the University. The following table summarises the usage in terms of users and sessions.
Public Workstation Facility
Users Sessions
University 2,770 (48.4%) 172,493 (51.9%)
Colleges 2,912 (50.9%) 158,229 (47.6%)
External 44 (0.8%) 1,381 (0.4%)
TOTAL 5,726 (100.0%) 332,103 (100.0%)
Central Unix Service
21. The Central Unix Service continued to run on a multi-architecture cluster of Sun processors, using both Solaris 1 and Solaris 2 operating systems. During the year, the availability of Solaris 2 versions for almost all of the relevant applications software made it possible to plan to move wholly to that operating system; unfortunately a run of long term staff illnesses has caused this to be delayed from Michaelmas 1995 into 1996. The older machines will also be replaced with more modern hardware on this timescale. The CUS filing system was rationalised and expanded by the installation of two 20 GB RAID filestores, in April and September 1995 respectively; after some initial hardware problems both now seem to be working well. The separate system for undergraduate teaching only (Thor) has operated successfully since coming into service in January 1995. During the Christmas 1994 vacation, the CUS was the victim of a severe hacking incident which originated overseas; while the exact loophole by which the intruder gained access to the password file was never discovered there has fortunately been no recurrence.
22. The following table gives a summary of statistical information for the use of CUS under Solaris 1 only in 1994-95 (with 1993-94 in italics). The substantial increase in the number of active users is mostly due to former holders of Phoenix accounts who preferred to move to another multi-user system rather than to acquire their own in-house equipment. System performance remained poor at peak times, reflecting the unsuitability of Unix systems for coping with the problems of resource allocation which inevitably arise with a large and varied user population.
Central Unix Service
CPU Users
University 93.2% 89.2% 4,664 2,941
Colleges 6.7% 10.6% 552 591
External 0.1% 0.1% 52 34
TOTAL 100.0% 100.0% 5,268 3,566
23. During the year the Syndicate spent much time debating whether or not to recommend the introduction of charging for use of the CUS. The problem is that, while there may be good practical reasons for not charging for modest use of a centrally funded system, not charging for high levels of use simply encourages large users to go ahead without considering either the usefulness or the cost of their computations and distorts cost benefit comparisons between the use of central facilities and those in individual departments or research groups. In these days of severely limited resources, the perceived risk of spending significant amounts of central funds on enhancing the CUS simply in order to benefit a small number of not particularly deserving users is simply not acceptable. General Board permission was therefore obtained to introduce from 1 January 1996 a rough and ready charging scheme which should only affect a handful of the largest users.
User Administration
24. In the first months of 1995, User Administration staff were kept busy coping with the introduction of the Magpie modem service and the Pelican archive store. As the end of the Phoenix service approached, there was a constant flow of users wanting to register for new systems and to rescue their Phoenix data. Electronic mailing lists of undergraduates were compiled from Registry data for Mathematics and Medieval and Modern Languages but, sadly, their misuse by a minority of students has required moderated lists to be introduced. Other incidents involving the misuse of computing resources arose throughout the year and although none of them were major, a significant amount of staff time was spent on investigations and the Director held several disciplinary interviews.
25. In October 1995, data from the Registry was again used to pre-register all new undergraduates in the Computing Service database and to give them accounts on the PWF and Hermes; all three years of current undergraduates have now been dealt with in this way. Some 20 Colleges also pre-registered undergraduates on their in-house systems using identifiers from the Service. Unfortunately, the pre-registration of post-graduates, using information from individual Colleges because comprehensive data from the Registry was not available, was more time-consuming and less successful and could only be completed for four Colleges. During the first week of term, User Administration staff broke all previous records, processing 170 individual registrations in a single day. It is hoped to resolve during 1996 problems which have arisen with plans for the pre-registration of academic and assistant staff.
Printer Spooling
26. The Central Unix Service and a number of other systems within the Service and in other institutions used to rely on the Phoenix spooling system to direct their output to the appropriate printer or plotter. This has now been replaced by a new Unix-based spooling system, which has a gateway to the PWF so that it is possible to access printers across what was formerly a firm divide. Since September 1995 users have had to pay for all the output they produce on Computing Service laserprinters; they may choose between a pre-payment DIY service and a more expensive checked output service provided by Printroom staff. Two departments have made arrangements to pay for named students to have a modest amount of free printing.
Data archive
27. The Nearnet Unix interface to the StorageTek Automated Cartridge Store, which was provided in 1993-94 to make it easier to convert Phoenix user data into a form which would be useful after September 1995, has also enabled the implementation of the Pelican service for archiving user files from other systems. At the moment, Pelican has a relatively small number of very active users; the replacement of the hardware by more modern equipment, in order to reduce running costs, is currently under consideration.
Advanced Computing
28. Much planning took place during the year for the installation of an Hitachi multiple parallel processor, the impetus and funding for which has been arranged by a group of scientific departments, led by Applied Mathematics. The machine will be located in the Computer Laboratory, in the space previously occupied by the IBM mainframe, but its use will be restricted to those members of the departments involved who have a particular need for advanced computing resources and the Computing Service's involvement will be limited to housing the machine and providing a small amount of facilities management. The front-end vector machine, which is quite powerful in its own right, is due to arrive early in 1996, with the parallel processor following later in the year. Meanwhile, Cambridge users have been getting some advance experience of the Hitachi equipment via a 2 Mb/s link, provided with the assistance of the Network division, to the Hitachi research laboratories at Maidenhead.
Support services
Unix and VMS Support
29. This service provides support to the managers of institutional Unix and VMS based computing facilities, whose needs vary widely depending on their skills and expertise. The group now has the hardware resources to provide support for several proprietary Unix operating systems: Sun (Solaris 1 and 2), DEC Alpha (OSF/1), Silicon Graphics (IRIX); it also supports LINUX, a free and very popular Unix-compatible operating system for IBM PCs which was developed by contributors around the Internet. The major customers of Unix Support during the year were Astronomy, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Materials Science, and Physics; 19 other institutions received significant support, and over 80 others made some use of the service. Unfortunately, the combination of illness and the need to provide emergency cover for the electronic mail service so reduced staff resources in September 1995 that the Unix Support service was effectively withdrawn for the whole of the Michaelmas term.
30. A number of institutions continue to have an established commitment to DEC VMS based computing. During the year, the main users of VMS Support were the University Library (which runs a substantial service with over 400 simultaneous users at peak times), Astronomy and Engineering; 16 other institutions received significant support and a further 50 were given minor assistance. The group's ten year old MicroVAX II was replaced by a DEC Alpha workstation running VMS, which complemented the existing VAX workstation and provided a hardware base for supporting both old and new systems.
Support for Purchases of Personal Systems
31. This service provides individual users with purchasing advice, both on the best type of machine for meeting a given set of requirements and on where to buy it most cheaply. Price and availability information for users was obtained from a wide range of vendors, including local retail stores, and was made available on the World Wide Web server. Special deals for hardware supply were arranged with IBM, Apple and Viglen and there were many enquiries about modems for using the Magpie service. In July 1995, a seminar held in collaboration with Apple was very successful and in the following November a Demonstration Day involving nine hardware and software vendors attracted over 800 members of the University.
External Hardware Maintenance
32. This service provides two types of charged hardware support:
a full cover contract service for a single annual payment (with the exclusion of certain very expensive repairs which are charged extra at cost),
a non-contract service where all repairs are undertaken on a best-efforts basis and the charge reflects the time and materials involved.
The following tables summarise the repairs carried out during 1994-95 (with the figures for 1993-94 in italics). In general terms the mix of work remained much the same, although the total number of repairs fell slightly, no doubt reflecting the increased reliability of modern technology.
Equipment repaired by Type
Contract Non-Contract
BBC microcomputers 20 29 41 38
IBM PC &c. 298 270 175 166
Apple Macintosh 65 82 186 201
Printers 62 75 63 69
Other Equipment 31 65 71 105
TOTAL 476 521 536 579
Equipment repaired by Institution
Contract Non-Contract
University 411 430 422 443
Colleges 65 91 113 131
External - - 1 5
TOTAL 476 521 536 579
Software Sales
33. This service supplies members of the University and Colleges with a range of software for personal computers and scientific workstations at advantageous rates while, as required by the central bodies, recovering all software licence, media and documentation costs from charges to users. It also administers University-wide agreements for workstation support, and continued to operate DECCampus during the year while negotiating new arrangements with Sun and Silicon Graphics. New CHEST deals included a further five-year contract for the NAg Libraries and a revised Microsoft Select agreement. In Michaelmas 1995, the Syndicate began a review of the operation of Software Sales since it was established in 1989, with a view to making recommendations which will ensure its continued success.
34. The following table summarises software sales during 1994-95 (with the figures for 1993-94 in italics). The number of items (i.e. full copies of a software package, upgrades, sets of documentation or maintenance contracts) again showed a substantial increase, while the most popular individual products continued to be LAN Workplace for DOS, Novell Netware, Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit and Microsoft Select. During the year, the determined efforts of staff at all levels saw the backlog of outstanding orders first brought under control and then practically eliminated. At the same time, transferring all the product registration information to a database not only made it easy to track sales by product and by institution but enormously speeded up routine tasks such as notifying registered users of a product that an upgrade has become available.
Software Sales
Items
Media & manuals 8,157 3,753
Communications 14,523 9,966
Office packages & operating systems 4,208 3,291
Word processing, spreadsheets & databases 900 601
Graphics & drawing, statistics 223 284
Programming languages, mathematics/libraries 145 84
Miscellaneous 640 1,637
TOTAL 28,796 19,616
Printing and Reproduction Service
35. The Printroom eventually moved into its purposely refurbished area in the Cockcroft building in the Easter vacation 1995; after a few teething troubles, the accommodation has proved very successful. An on-line finisher was added to the Xerox Docutech to speed up the production of saddle-stitched and trimmed booklets. The total amount of work got through remained at just under 3M impressions, with rather more than half being for the Computer Laboratory as a whole and the remainder for external customers. The charged service for the production of printed material and transparencies on the Xerox colour copier/printer continued but colour printing technology is changing rapidly and a higher definition Apple Colour Laserwriter was also purchased. This is under test and should be providing a networked service from the PWF early in 1996, and from the CUS shortly afterwards.
Advice and consultancy
Consultancy
36. Although the front-line for all technical enquiries from individual users is the Help Desk, discussed in the next paragraph, Computing Service staff also provide advice and assistance by means of consultations on topics connected with the use of centrally managed services, institutional facilities and personal equipment. In addition, the staff of the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre combine a highly appreciated specialist consultancy and programming service for literary and linguistic projects and for humanities computing generally with looking after the Sidgwick Computing Facility. The following table gives a summary of statistical information for 1994-95 (with 1993-94 in italics) for all kinds of advice and consultancy work (including the Help Desk); the apparent decline in the total number of hours owes much more to changes in recording practices than to any real reduction in the workload. The "External" heading includes both time spent responding to enquiries from outside institutions world-wide and charged specialist work carried out by LLCC.
Consulting
Hours
University 5,902 (62.2%) 8,428 (71.0%)
Colleges 1,515 (16.0%) 1,765 (14.9%)
External 2,066 (21.8%) 1,677 (14.1%)
TOTAL 9,483 (100.0%) 11,870 (100.0%)
Help Desk
37. The Help Desk handled over 15,000 technical user enquiries during the year, 44% being made in person, 30% by telephone and 26% by electronic mail. The calls varied from the trivial to the extremely complex; the results from the logging software show that 84% were answered on the spot or later the same day, while only 12% were still open after two days. The introduction of full or part-time technicians to handle personal and telephone calls has worked out very well, and they routinely answer almost 90% of all they receive. The number of calls was higher than normal during the summer of 1995, partly due to people moving away from Phoenix, while the usual increase in the number of enquiries at the beginning of the new academic year was particularly marked, reflecting a greater awareness of IT across the University which is at least partly the result of media attention to the Internet. For the first time, statistics on the number of Help Desk calls by institution are included in the Statistical Annex; the following table gives a summary for 1994-95 (with 1993-94 in italics).
Help Desk
Calls
University 11,312 (73.5%) 9,540 (72.2%)
Colleges 3,232 (21.0%) 2,972 (22.5%)
External 839 (5.5%) 704 (5.3%)
TOTAL 15,383 (100.0%) 13,216 (100.0%)
Sidgwick Site Support Team
38. Following lengthy consultations with interested parties the Syndicate decided in the summer of 1995 to establish a small support team, based in the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre, to provide front-line support and to co-ordinate technical liaison with all the departments on the Sidgwick Site. The team will initially consist of one member of the Computing Service's Technical User Support group working in conjunction with the holder of a newly established computer support post for the School of Arts and Humanities. Although the latter has not yet been appointed, some useful liaison and advisory work has already been carried out.
Training
39. This service provides training courses on centrally-managed services, applications software for personal and distributed systems and network based services, and produces added value by reducing the load on the advisory services and ensuring more effective use of computer equipment throughout the University. Courses were again advertised jointly with the Committee on the Training and Development of University Teachers, while discussions with the Assistant Staff Office led to the development of training courses specifically aimed at assistant staff, with the first pilot scheme workshop taking place in December 1995.
40. The following tables give a summary of statistical information for 1994-95 (with 1993-94 in italics). Greater user awareness (especially in the arts and humanities), improved publicity and a new, more convenient on-line booking mechanism all contributed to an increase of over 30% in attendances. The availability of the Balfour Macintosh Room permitted the introduction of all-practical courses, where each person on the course has a machine in front of them and can try out things as the lecturer goes along; this proved very popular, especially with beginners. The continued use of course evaluation forms provided useful feedback as well as satisfaction ratings consistently in excess of 90%. The number of "no-shows" (people who sign up for a course but then fail to attend without any advance warning) continued to give cause for concern and the reasons for this behaviour are being investigated.
Course Types
Sessions Attendances
Computing in Cambridge 5 3 92 47
Personal Computers 42 43 1,208 701
Unix 27 22 495 473
Networking 19 16 533 337
Word & Doc. Processing 40 35 588 561
Spreadsheets & Databases 8 7 149 163
Statistical Computing 14 23 324 234
Other courses 5 9 65 69
TOTAL 160 158 3,454 2,585
Course Attendance
Attendances
University 2,816 2,078
Colleges 565 388
External 73 105
TOTAL 3,454 2,571
Directorate and liaison
Institution Liaison
41. Although this division has only two officers, they can call on other Service staff, especially from the Directorate, Network Support and Technical User Support, to help them provide advice to the Councils of the Schools and to the computer committees of individual institutions. During the year, the need to help institutions prepare bids for allocations from the IT Fund overtook the previous policy of providing general in-depth reviews of IT strategy for a comparatively small number of institutions each year. As a result, the division interacted with many more departments than usual, particularly in the arts, humanities and social sciences, but rather less fully.
42. Institution Liaison staff attended School, Departmental and College computing committees whenever asked and spent much time advising departments on the difficult subject, already mentioned above, of how best to obtain funding for network infrastructure projects. They also helped with HEFCE teaching assessments and assisted in the selection process for computer and technical staff in several University institutions and Colleges. The termly meetings of College Computer Officers were all well attended and enthusiastically supported; a first meeting with their departmental equivalents is planned for January 1996. Finally, a major revision of the Rules made by the IT Syndicate was undertaken in order to bring them more in line with modern computing developments and a code of practice was produced for those members of the University who may wish to publish information on the World Wide Web.
Report of the Information Technology Syndicate on the University Computing Service for 1995-96
Contents
Introduction
Review of Academic Computing
Rules and Guidelines
The Computing Service
Network
Granta Backbone Network
JANET and SuperJANET
Cambridge University Data Network
Network-related services
Electronic Mail
Information Services
Centrally-managed services
Public Workstation Facility
Central Unix Service
User Administration
Pelican data archive service
Advanced Computing
Support services
Unix and VMS Support
Support for Purchases of Personal Systems
External Hardware Maintenance
Software Sales
Printing and Reproduction Service
Advice and consultancy
Consultancy
Help Desk
Sidgwick Site Support Team
Training
Directorate and liaison
Institution Liaison
Introduction
1. The main remits of the Information Technology Syndicate are to develop computing policy for the University and the Colleges and to supervise the University Computing Service. The present report covers the work of the Syndicate and the Service during the 1995-96 academic year, with a narrative which extends to December 1996. A Statistical Annex giving details of certain services down to the level of individual institutions has been circulated to various University bodies and to Colleges; further copies are available from the University Registry. This statistical information relates to a mixture of centrally funded and charged services; it is intended only to give a general picture of what the Service has done rather than to be sufficiently comprehensive or detailed for the meaningful attribution of Service costs.
Review of Academic Computing
2. During the year, the Syndicate provided the General Board with advice on the best way of implementing the recommendations of the 1993 report of the Review of Academic Computing. The membership of the Syndicate was changed to make the Librarian a member ex officio, to add a co-opted graduate student and to formalise the arrangement by which Biological Sciences and the Clinical School each nominate one representative. While the formal proposals for a Technical Committee of the Syndicate were dropped on the advice of the General Board, the Syndicate agreed to appoint a less formal version with members drawn from College and Departmental computer staff, the Computing Service and the Library.
3. Although the General Board had decided that the drastic cutback in equipment funding precluded their finding any money for an IT Fund for 1996-97, the Syndicate felt strongly that the experience in the preceding two years had been so successful that the concept must not be forgotten. The need to divert Computing Service staff resources to more pressing new developments had made it impracticable to implement the Review's detailed recommendations on School support teams, but there had been considerable improvements in general liaison between the Service and other institutions and the number of local computer support staff had also increased substantially. The Syndicate now sees building on these developments as the best way forward in obtaining improved advice and consultancy arrangements for end users.
Rules and Guidelines
4. The Rules made by the Syndicate were substantially recast to reflect the many changes in computing practice which had taken place in the decade or so since their last revision and the Regulations for the Syndicate were changed to allow the relevant authorities to ask for the Rules to be applied to nominated University and College facilities. Consequential changes were also made to the Syndicate's disciplinary procedure and to the guidelines issued by the Computing Service which explain how the Rules apply to typical user activities. The Syndicate responded to the increasing pressure from outside bodies to ensure that all software used within an organisation is legal by developing a Software Policy, which was approved by the General Board and widely promulgated throughout the University. A set of guidelines for World Wide Web information providers was also approved and circulated.
The Computing Service
5. The Computing Service provides several different types of service. These include necessarily University-wide services such as networking and electronic mail and centrally-managed services such as the Public Workstation Facility (PWF) and the Central Unix Service (CUS), which may be used by any member of the University with a need for them but which offer similar facilities to those which some institutions provide in-house for their own staff and students. The Service also provides support services for institutional and individually-owned facilities ranging from local area networks and personal computers to powerful multi-user computers and scientific workstations, and advice and consultancy services including a Help Desk for the centrally-managed facilities and training courses spanning all types of facility.
6. The Computing Service is organised into five divisions, three primarily concerned with providing centrally-managed facilities and specialised technical support and two concerned with supporting either individual users or institutions.
The Network division looks after the University Data Network (CUDN) and the Granta Backbone Network (GBN), and provides support for institutional networking
The Systems and Development division is responsible for the PWF
The Systems and Unix division is responsible for the CUS, the Thor teaching facility, electronic mail and news services and provides Unix and VAX/VMS support to institutions
The User Services division runs the Help Desk and the training courses and provides general technical support to individual users. It is also responsible for software, documentation and bookshop sales, purchasing advice, printing and reception
The Institution Liaison division maintains contact with Heads of Department and other senior staff concerning institutional IT strategies and related matters.
7. The following table gives the estimated cost of each of the individual services which the Computing Service provides, with the previous year's figures in italics. All expenditure is included, whether funded centrally or by means of cost recovery from charged user services, which produce in total roughly £825K per year (£750K in 1995).
1996 (£K) 1995 (£K)
Service Staff Other Total % Total %
Network 475 399 874 22.0% 918 23.6%
Network-related 217 100 317 8.0% 180 4.6%
PWF 267 128 395 9.9% 474 12.2%
CUS 163 81 244 6.1% 299 7.7%
Other centrally-run facilities 122 62 184 4.6% 164 4.2%
Support services 430 388 818 20.5% 720 18.5%
Advice & consultancy 455 35 490 12.3% 513 13.2%
Directorate & liaison 267 125 392 9.9% 373 9.6%
Administration & overheads 142 124 266 6.7% 256 6.6%
TOTAL 2,538 1,442 3,980 100.0% 3,897 100.0%
The following paragraphs discuss each of the services in turn.
Network
Granta Backbone Network
8. The Computing Service continued to be responsible to the Granta Backbone Network Management Committee for all GBN operations. The design of the GBN made it fairly straightforward to temporarily reroute existing connections while building work was taking place at the University Library (Aoi Pavilion) and at Trinity College. While the data communication links discussed in the following paragraphs were once again the main use of the GBN, there were also considerable increases in the numbers of private GBN links used for connecting physically separate sites belonging to the same institution and for carrying security camera pictures and building services monitoring information from remote locations back to the University's central control room. The JTMC continued to install copper cables in the GBN ducts for voice network use. Further details of GBN operations (and an account of the restructuring of the repaynents on the University's internal loan for GBN implementation) are contained in the annual report of the GBN Management Committee.
JANET and SuperJANET
9. Like most academic sites, Cambridge began the year suffering from a problem outside its control in the form of the shortage of capacity on international links, especially to the USA. Although UKERNA eventually succeeded in much improving the situation in this respect, some users then began to experience bandwidth problems in accessing the LINX, at Telehouse in London, which is the interconnect point between JANET and the other Internet Service Providers. The 34 Mbit/s SuperJANET link was again heavily used, especially for video-conferencing. Much time and effort was spent on contractual issues, both in relation to the provision of JANET services to other local HEIs and to the implications of the new JANET Acceptable Use Policy for the provision of connections to certain independent organisations within Cambridge which are closely associated with the University.
Cambridge University Data Network
10. The table below gives numbers of CUDN connections of various kinds at the end of 1995-96 (with end 1994-95 figures in italics). The continuing trend for the use of X.25 and asynchronous connections to decline and for new institutional installations to consist of a local area network linked by ethernet to the CUDN is clearly visible; this has now progressed to the extent where only a handful of institutions do not have an ethernet connection.
University Data Network
Asynchronous X.25 Ethernet
University 156 361 34 63 73 64
Colleges 21 28 10 12 32 28
External 3 6 - 1 12 10
TOTAL 180 395 44 76 117 102
An area router at Old Addenbrooke's was added to the network of these devices interlinked by GBN fibres which provides the CUDN filtered ethernet service.
11. During the year a pilot 155 Mbit/s Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) backbone link was installed between the New Museums Site and the Clinical School; after an initial testing period the direct router to router link was enhanced by the installation of an ATM switch at each end in order to allow several different types of service to be carried simultaneously. This link is the first stage in the provision of an ATM backbone service across the University and is shortly to be extended as the result of funds which have been made available under the HEFCE LAN/MAN Initiative 1996/98 for the installation of ATM routers to replace two of the existing area routers (which will then be available for redeployment in other parts of the network).
12. During the summer of 1996 it became necessary to decide how best to build on the success of the uncharged pilot Magpie fast modem service, which by then had over 2,000 registered users and several hundred active ones. It was decided that the only way to guarantee the availability of funds for buying modems and exchange lines as necessary to maintain an acceptable level of performance was to introduce charging, which was done from 1 September. Users or their institutions must now pay in advance for annual registrations which permit an individual to have up to 250 hours of connect time; the service is available on these terms to all classes of user, including undergraduates. Around 1,000 users have already registered, mostly staff and rerearch students; the initial provision of 20 lines with 28.8Kbit/s modems is already being increased to 32 and will be further extended as and when necessary.
13. The developments described above were backed up by much Network division staff activity both in providing CUDN connections and in advising institutions on how to wire up buildings, establish local area networks and connect them to the CUDN. The installation backlog was kept under control throughout the year despite a very high level of demand, although the total income from installation costs charged out to users during the 1995-96 financial year was slightly down at £320,000. As the result of a number of individual cases, the attention of the General Board officers was drawn to the technical problems and the expense involved in providing high-speed connections to parts of institutions occupying temporary accommodation away from the main University sites served by the GBN.
Network-related services
Electronic Mail
14. The Computing Service operates two electronic mail (email) facilities, the central switch which routes all email coming into Cambridge to the appropriate destination and the Hermes networked message store. During 1995-96, there was a very substantial increase in the use of email compared to the preceding year (100% for Hermes and 50% for email on the CUS) while in one three-week period in February over 10,000 different users read mail on Hermes. Unfortunately, the increased load occurred at a time when the person primarily responsible for looking after the mail service had left at short notice; it was most fortunate that a member of the Unix Support team was available to step in and to do an excellent job not only of holding the fort but also of overseeing the upgrading and re-organisation of the whole of the hardware and system software until the new mail specialist arrived in April.
15. The period of poor Hermes performance begin in October 1995 when too many of the newly registered undergraduates tried to change their passwords at the same time. A mixture of software fixes and memory upgrades improved the situation for a time but by the middle of the Lent term the overloading had become acute. It was decided not to try further temporary fixes, but to make major changes to the system design so that hardware could be added incrementally to cope with very much greater loads than those currently being experienced. This involved upgrading the operating system on all processors to Solaris 2 and changing the mail handling software to Exim, which was originally developed within the Computing Service and is now in use on Unix systems worldwide. Additional hardware was also installed, including a small machine dedicated to system management and especially password changing. The resulting mail system has had little difficulty in coping with the load since its introduction, even at the start of the new academic year.
Information Services
16. The central World Wide Web server continued to hold both Computing Service material and general University information, including the undergraduate and graduate prospectuses and documents from the Press Office and Publicity Unit, while a mechanism for providing University societies with Web pages was established. The following table shows the increase in accesses to the more popular sections of the undergraduate prospectus over the last two calendar years:
Section 1996 (11 Dec) 1995 (full year)
Colleges 79,923 21,216
Applying 64,472 16,837
Courses 61,611 15,960
The Information group is to be congratulated on keeping both the Web information and the Service's printed documentation up to date during a year which saw several changes of personnel and ended with the departure of the Web data manager on maternity leave. The price of printed leaflets, which had remained constant for many years despite a substantial growth in the number of pages, was increased to recover a larger proportion of the production cost.
17. Use of the Gopher server declined rapidly (in favour of the Web) and it was closed in July 1996. The Web server received requests from a wide variety of sources, with the daily number peaking at 34,500 in early October 1996; 40-50% of all accesses came from within the University. A Web proxy/cache server has been set up as a pilot trial, with the aim of reducing external network usage and improving response time by maintaining local copies of recently-referenced documents for faster access by local users. The following table compares approximate figures for Web activity over the last two academic years:
1995-96 1994-95
Monthly Web accesses (September) 475,000 170,000
Originating computers: University 3,000 1,500
Originating computers: elsewhere 60,000 20,000
Other Web servers in Cambridge 90 40
18. The USENET news server continued to remain popular, despite an elusive system problem which caused repeated disruption to service over three weeks in July/August 1996. The following table compares approximate measures of news server activity over the last two academic years:
1995-96 1994-95
Monthly news server connections 210,000 190,000
Proportion from the CUS 15% 18%
Institutions making non-CUS connections 120 80
Peak simultaneous connections 190 160
Total (and local) newsgroups 7,000 (160) 5,600 (150)
Monthly volume (individual articles) 9 GB (3.5 M) 7.8 GB (2.75 M)
Centrally-managed services
Public Workstation Facility
20. The following table summarises the 1995-96 usage of the PWF in terms of users and sessions, with 1994-95 figures in italics:
Public Workstation Facility
Users Sessions
University 3,114 (46.2%) 2,770 (48.4%) 175,767 (47.4%) 172,493 (51.9%)
Colleges 3,614 (53.6%) 2,912 (50.9%) 192,810 (52.0%) 158,229 (47.6%)
External 17 (0.3%) 44 (0.8%) 2,328 (0.6%) 1,381 (0.4%)
TOTAL 6,745 (100.0%) 5,726 (100.0%) 370,905 (100.0%) 332,103 (100.0%)
Other tables and graphs are to be found in the Statistical Annex. The reason why College use appears to be in the majority is that all undergraduate use is registered under a student's College.
21.There were several enhancements to the PWF infrastructure. Following the successful installation of 16 GB of RAID disc file storage for user files in January 1996, a second similar system was added during the summer; this allowed the default storage allocation for an individual user to be increased to 10 MB. The site cluster applications servers, which are physically located at the Computer Laboratory, were replaced by faster machines, moved to new benches in the old mainframe room and linked together using 100 Mbit/s fast ethernet. Computing Service staff were also involved in the establishment of the Clinical School's new classroom server, which is linked to the PWF for user registration and user filestore access.
22. Question marks remain about the long term future of the centrally-managed student teaching PWF classrooms, which lack proper long term funding arrangements. The PC clone seats provide particular cause for concern, since three-quarters of them are over three years old, with too little power and memory to be effective when it comes to running applications under Windows 95. When plans to replace them in the Long Vacation 1996 had to be abandoned because of the cutback in University equipment funds, it was necessary also to abandon a proposed change to using Windows 95 as the primary PWF operating system; this will restrict the ability of academic staff to use the latest versions of standard applications packages in subect-based courses using the PWF equipment. The installation of Novell Netware Release 4 was again investigated and was deferred pending experiments to demonstrate the ability of the applications and file servers to cope under it with the size of user directory required by the PWF. Alternatives to Novell Netware are also being evaluated.
Central Unix Service
23. From early 1996, the Central Unix Service has been running on a configuration of two Sun SPARCserver 1000s using the Solaris 2 operating system and two 20 GB RAID filestores, while both the older processors and the use of Solaris 1 were rapidly phased out. The separate SPARCserver-based Thor teaching facility for taught Unix-based courses in science and technology subjects has performed well, except for an obscure and troublesome problem in the Easter Term which eventually went away when the processor board was changed. The following table presents summary statistical information for the use of the CUS under Solaris 2 only in 1995-96 (with those for its use in 1994-95 under Solaris 1 in italics) and also gives 1995-96 information for Thor.
Central Unix Service Thor
CPU Users CPU Users
University 97.8% 93.2% 4,771 4,664 12.1% 124
Colleges 2.1% 6.7% 340 555 87.9% 415
External 0.2% 0.1% 57 49
TOTAL 100.0% 100.0% 5,168 5,268 100.0% 539
24. The rough and ready charging scheme designed to prevent large users of the CUS from going ahead without considering either the usefulness or the cost of their computations was introduced as planned in January 1996. It worked very well: a handful of users were thrown off for exceeding their quota, one user's department paid for additional quota and operating the scheme did not require too much staff time. The impact of a discovery in April by the national Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was much more far-reaching. In the course of a quite separate investigation at another university the CERT discovered evidence that an unknown hacker had penetrated CUS security and had been collecting user identifier passwords; as a result, all 15,000 user account passwords on the CUS and other Computing Service systems which might have been compromised had to be changed. Although the incident attracted much media interest, the chances of the hacker's being caught are very slight.
User Administration
25. The procedures involved in the registration of new undergraduates in preparation for the Michaelmas Term are now well understood by all concerned and the 1996 exercise went much more smoothly than might have been expected at a time when the number of trained user administration staff was unavoidably well below establishment. Postgraduate registrations were again more difficult and discussions are to be held with staff from the Board of Graduate Studies about how best to tackle the problem of having identifiers and email addresses ready for the new students when they arrive despite the fact that it is often unclear until the very last minute exactly which prospective graduate students will actually turn up. Arrangements for coping with changes in the staff and student rolls during the year have been satisfactorily established, although automation of the procedures for cancelling postgraduates at the end of their stay remains difficult because there are so many different sets of possible circumstances.
26. In the run-up to the Michaelmas Term 1996, user administration staff successfully handled the introduction of the charged Magpie service, not only dealing with individual users but also giving departments the option to purchase block registrations for those of their staff who had previously had free ones. Earlier the CERT discovery (see above) had placed a very large load on user administration staff, who soon became capable of reinstating suspended passwords in their sleep. As usual, a significant amount of time had to be spent throughout the year on investigations concerning the misuse of computing resources; the Director held several disciplinary interviews and one case was handled by the Syndicate's Disciplinary Panel.
Pelican data archive service
27. By the end of the year, the Pelican data archive library was storing 65 GB of data for 850 different users; details are given in the Annex. After lengthy investigation it was decided to replace the StorageTek equipment, originally installed in 1986, by a much smaller ATL library which uses digital tapes holding up to 20 GB each; the capital cost will be recovered from maintenance savings in less than two years. The new library can hold as much data as the old one but is physically much smaller and has room for only 48 tapes. Since both libraries use the same software, users hardly noticed the changeover when it took place at the beginning of November 1996; as an incidental by-product, the whole of the compressed version of the Phoenix filestore archive is now contained on a single DLT tape.
Advanced Computing
28. The installation of the Hitachi front-end vector machine took place as planned in January 1996, that of the multiple parallel processor followed at the end of September and the initial exploitation phase is going very much according to plan. The impetus and funding for this system was arranged by a group of scientific departments led by Applied Mathematics and it does not come under the Syndicate but has a separate committee of management. Computing Service involvement is limited to providing facilities management in the form of a senior programmer with a particular interest in advanced computing systems.
Support services
Unix and VMS Support
29. This service provides the managers of institutional Unix and VMS based computing facilities with support tailored to their specific requirements. The group has the hardware resources to provide support for several proprietary Unix operating systems: Sun (Solaris 1 and 2), DEC (Digital Unix), and Silicon Graphics (IRIX); also LINUX, a free and very popular UNIX-compatible operating system for IBM PC (and other) systems which was developed by contributors around the Internet. The major customers of Unix Support during the year were Physics, the Isaac Newton Institute, Geography, Chemistry, and Genetics; 22 other institutions received significant support, and 85 more made some use of the service. Although their numbers have gradually declined, several institutions continue to have an established commitment to DEC VMS based computing. During the year, the main users of VMS Support were the University Library (which runs a substantial service for in-house users and for library staff and users around the University), Engineering, Earth Sciences, and Astronomy; 10 other institutions also made some use of the service.
Support for Purchases of Personal Systems
30. This service collates information from vendors and other sources in order to provide individual users with advice both on the best type of machine for meeting their requirements and on where to buy it most cheaply. Monthly meetings with major vendors have proved very useful both for obtaining information and for providing feedback on quality and delivery problems; Dell in particular have responded by offering aggressive pricing of their good quality PC clone systems. The second annual Demonstration Day in November 1996 involved exhibits by 15 hardware and software vendors and attracted over 1500 members of the University (compared with 9 and 800 a year earlier).
External Hardware Maintenance
31. Two types of charged hardware support are on offer:
a full cover contract service for a single annual payment (with the exclusion of certain very expensive repairs which are charged extra at cost),
a non-contract service where all repairs are undertaken on a best-efforts basis and the charge reflects the time and materials involved.
The following tables summarise the repairs carried out during 1995-96 (with the figures for 1994-95 in italics). In general terms the mix of work was much the same, although there were more Macintosh repairs. The increased reliability of modern technology was reflected in a 10% drop in the number of repairs and, as shown in the Annex, a rather larger one in the hours spent on them.
Equipment repaired by Type
Contract Non-Contract
BBC microcomputers 6 20 25 41
IBM PC &c. 237 298 189 175
Apple Macintosh 87 65 194 186
Printers 57 62 49 63
Other Equipment 22 31 65 71
TOTAL 409 476 522 536
Equipment repaired by Institution
Contract Non-Contract
University 328 411 417 421
Colleges 81 65 98 113
External - - 7 2
TOTAL 409 476 522 536
Software Sales
32. This service supplies members of the University and Colleges with a range of charged software at advantageous rates for personal computers and scientific workstations and also administers University-wide workstation support agreements with DEC, Sun and Silicon Graphics. During the year, the Syndicate reported to the General Board on the first six years experience of Software Sales. The Board agreed that the operation should be continued but re-affirmed the requirement that all non-staff costs, and the costs of any additional staff which might be needed to cope with additional growth, must be recovered from charges to users. The existing trends towards not stocking high-volume products which it is cheaper for users to obtain from local retail outlets, of selling certain specialised, expensive and low volume but fairly widely applicable products at prices which are realistic but are not guaranteed to recover the full cost of the software and of not charging at all for some inexpensive items were also noted and approved, as was the tendency for more products to be distributed by methods other than lots of floppy discs.
33. The following table summarises software sales during 1995-96 (with the figures for 1994-95 in italics). The number of items (i.e. full copies of a software package, upgrades, sets of documentation or maintenance contracts) again showed a substantial increase, while the most popular individual products were once more Novell Netware, Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, Microsoft Maintenance and LAN Workplace for DOS, each of which recorded over one thousand sales. The backlog of outstanding orders which had built up in the first part of the year was reduced dramatically after Easter, despite the need to also process thousands of applications for Microsoft product maintenance, following the provision of a second full-time technician post in the Software Sales group. Software Sales staff also attended seminars in the increasingly important area of software auditing.
Software Sales
Items
Communications 9,082 14,523
Graphics & drawing, statistics 384 223
Office packages & operating systems 6,912 4,210
Programming languages, mathematics/libraries 266 145
Word processing, spreadsheets & databases 1,215 899
Miscellaneous 2,432 639
Media & manuals 16,090 8,157
TOTAL 36,381 28,796
Printing and Reproduction Service
34. The Xerox Docutech again got through a total of just under 3M impressions, 60% for the Computer Laboratory as a whole and 40% for external customers; the introduction networked document submission has taken longer than expected but is soon expected to become a standard option. The colour copy service has now settled down but needs to attract more business to pay its way; to facilitate this the present equipment is to be replaced by a system with improved performance and a scanning capability.
Advice and consultancy
Consultancy
35. As well as manning the Help Desk, which is discussed in the next paragraph, Computing Service staff provide user consultations on a wide range of topics. In addition, the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre (LLCC) combines a highly appreciated specialist consultancy and programming service for literary and humanities computing with looking after the Sidgwick Computing Facility. The following table gives a summary of statistical information for 1995-96 (with 1994-95 in italics) for all kinds of advice and consultancy work (including the Help Desk, the additional throughput of which accounts for most of the increase between the two years). The "External" heading includes both time spent responding to enquiries from outside institutions world-wide and charged specialist work carried out by LLCC.
Consulting
Hours
University 7,161 (69.2%) 5,908 (62.3%)
Colleges 1,698 (16.4%) 1,514 (16.0%)
External 1,486 (14.4%) 2,061 (21.7%)
TOTAL 10,345 (100.0%) 9,483 (100.0%)
Help Desk
36. The following table summarises Help Desk calls for 1995-96 (with 1994-95 in italics):
Help Desk
Calls
University 13,162 (72.7%) 11,324 (72.7%)
Colleges 3,796 (21.0%) 3,220 (20.9%)
External 1,144 (6.3%) 839 (5.5%)
TOTAL 18,102 (100.0%) 15,383 (100.0%)
Of the calls, 46% were made in person, 32% by telephone and 22% by electronic mail. Although many calls were trivial in the sense of having well known and quickly given answers, some were extremely complex; the logging software output shows that 85% were answered on the spot or later the same day and that only 11% were still open after two days.
37. Between 1993-94 and 1995-96 the same number of Help Desk staff handled numbers of calls which increased by 37%, from 13,216 to 18,102. When a bid for an additional front desk technician was not successful, it was clear that something must be done to reduce the load to more manageable proportions and in July 1996 the Syndicate approved a package of measures which were introduced at the beginning of November. The main emphasis is on encouraging users to make more use of the computer support staff in their own institution, who will often be more familiar with the background to the user's problem than someone at the central Help Desk. A "fast track" mechanism called TechLink has also been set up to ensure that local computer support staff are fully aware of all new developments relating to Computing Service facilities. Initial experience suggests that, thanks to goodwill on the part of all concerned, the new arrangements are likely to prove at least as effective as the old.
Sidgwick Site Support Team
38. This small support team consists of one Computer Officer from the Computing Service and one from the School of Arts and Humanities and is based in the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre. Its has proved most successful in carrying out its remit of providing front-line support and co-ordinating technical liaison with the Service for all the departments on the Sidgwick Site.
Training
39. This service provides training courses on centrally-managed services, applications software for personal and distributed systems and network based services, producing added value by reducing the load on the advisory services and ensuring more effective use of computer equipment throughout the University. Courses for academics were again advertised jointly with the Committee on the Training and Development of University Teachers, while the Assistant Staff Office met the cost of the development of several training course modules specifically aimed at assistant staff. During the year, 201 assistants attended 27 module sessions (class sizes being deliberately kept small); while the program for University staff is continuing, charged sessions are also being held for similar types of staff from the Colleges.
40. The following tables give a summary of statistical information for 1995-96 (with that for 1994-95 in italics). The numbers of courses and attendances both increased, while good turnouts at some of the more advanced courses, which were introduced in response to user demand, confirmed the growing level of IT sophistication within the user community. The highest attendances were at introductory sessions on PC Windows applications, Unix, the World Wide Web, SPSS and Word for Windows. The all-practical courses in the Balfour Macintosh Room continued to prove very popular, especially with beginners, and serious consideration is being given to providing a similar classroom using PCs. The course evaluation forms showed consistently high satisfaction ratings as well as providing other useful feedback, but the number of "no-shows" (people who sign up for a course but then fail to attend without any advance warning) continued to prove an apparently intractable problem.
Course Types
Sessions Attendances
Computing in Cambridge 5 5 89 92
Personal Computers 40 42 1,175 1,208
Unix 17 27 557 495
Networking 40 19 920 533
Word & Doc. Processing 40 40 687 588
Spreadsheets & Databases 11 8 221 149
Statistical Computing 13 14 212 324
Other courses 6 5 76 65
TOTAL 172 160 3,937 3,454
Course Attendance
Attendances
University 3,007 2,818
Colleges 794 563
External 136 73
TOTAL 3,937 3,454
Directorate and liaison
Institution Liaison
41. This division has only two officers, but they are able to call on other Service staff, especially from the Directorate, Network Support and Technical User Support, to help them provide advice to the Councils of the Schools and to individual institutions. School, Departmental and College computer committees were attended whenever requested and much time was also spent providing advice about network infrastructure projects. Institution Liaison staff also helped with HEFCE teaching assessments and assisted in the selection process for computer and technical staff in several University institutions and Colleges. The well established termly meetings of College Computer Officers and the newly organised meetings of their Departmental equivalents were both well attended and supported and the recent elections of members for the Technical Committee were keenly contested.
Report of the Information Technology Syndicate on the University Computing Service for 1996-97
Contents
Introduction
Syndicate Matters
Rules and Guidelines
The Computing Service
Network
Granta Backbone Network
JANET and SuperJANET
Cambridge University Data Network
Network-related Services
Electronic Mail
Information Services
Centrally-managed services
Public Workstation Facility
Central Unix Service
User Administration
Pelican data archive service
Advanced Computing
Support services
Unix and VMS Support
Support for Purchases of Personal Systems
External Hardware Maintenance
Software Sales
Printing and Reproduction Service
Advice and consultancy
Technical User Support
Consultancy
Help Desk
Training
Directorate and liaison
Institution Liaison
Introduction
1. The main remits of the Information Technology Syndicate are to develop computing policy for the University and the Colleges and to supervise the University Computing Service. To facilitate both, by reducing the delay between the end of the reporting period and the publication of the report, the period will in future be aligned with the University's financial year rather its academic one; because of this, the present transitional report only covers the work of the Syndicate and the Service for the ten months between October 1996 and July 1997. A Statistical Annex giving details of certain services down to the level of individual institutions has been circulated to various University bodies and to Colleges and further copies are available from the University Registry; this information is intended to give a general picture of Service activities rather than to provide a valid basis for the attribution of Service costs.
Syndicate Matters
2. During the year,the Syndicate provided input to academic community-wide discussions about the procurement of the replacement for the existing high-speed network (SuperJANET III), the way in which it should be funded and the future of videoconferencing. It now seems certain that the University will in future have to make a substantial financial contribution to retain the high bandwidth to which it has become used as one of the pilot sites for SuperJANET. When the General Board decided for a second successive year that the equipment funding situation did not allow money to be set aside for an IT Fund, the Syndicate re-iterated its view that the experience with the first two rounds of such funding, not least in terms of improved liaison between the Schools and the Computing Service, had been so successful that the concept should not be forgotten.
3. The year saw much discussion about the need for centrally-managed classrooms for undergraduate teaching. Finally, following an interim report from the Natural Sciences Tripos review committee recommending that all first year NST students should be required to take a course in Mathematics (including computing), the Syndicate agreed to recommend to the General Board that one new 80-seater PC classroom should be established on the New Museums Site to replace the two existing smaller ones in the Old Music School and in the Mond (the accommodation in the latter being of a particularly low standard). It was also decided that the Windows 95 operating system was too insecure to be used in teaching classrooms and that Windows NT should be given a full scale trial, initially in the Computing Service's new PC classroom for training courses (see below).
4. In the Michaelmas Term, the Syndicate agreed to establish an informal Technical Committee, chaired by a member of the Syndicate and having a membership drawn from College and Departmental computer staff, the Computing Service and the Library. The elections at the end of the term for members in the first two categories were keenly contested and produced a committee reflecting the wide range of computing interests and expertise within the different constituencies. At the three lengthy but very valuable meetings which were held in the remainder of the year a wide range of a topics were discussed, at a level of technical detail which would be inappropriate at the Syndicate proper, and a number of useful initatives were produced. Further details are given in the appropriate places below.
5. The Syndicate noted with regret the untimely death of Mr C B Robinson, of the Department of Education, whose experience and enthusiasm for the application of IT to teaching has been sorely missed. Following a long history of informal cross-membership, the Syndicate membership was formally increased to include a joint Telecommunications Management Committee appointee.
6. At the end of the year, Professor Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who had capped a long and fruitful association with the Computer Laboratory by succeeding to the Chairmanship of the Syndicate after completing the Review of Academic Computing, retired from the post after ably and effectively overseeing its post-Review development into a much more efficient body for the discussion of computing policy. The smooth course of its recent history is a tribute to his skill in ensuring that day-to-day concerns are not allowed to divert from the discussion of the really important issues. Professor N O Weiss takes over as Chairman from Michaelmas 1997.
Rules and Guidelines
7. While the Rules made by the Syndicate remained unchanged, by the end of the year their formal application had been extended outside the Computing Service to cover computing facilities in six University institutions and one College. At the beginning of the year, the University Software Policy was widely advertised to users. In July, following a relaxation of the previous policy of discouraging users from having personal World Wide Web pages on Computing Service facilities, a set of guidelines for their use was approved and circulated.
The Computing Service
8. The Computing Service provides a wide range of services. These include:
Necessarily University-wide services, including networks and related services such as electronic mail;
Centrally-managed services such as the Public Workstation Facility (PWF) and the Central Unix Service (CUS), which may be used by any member of the University who needs them but are similar to the facilities which some institutions provide in-house for their own staff and students;
Support services for institutional and individually-owned facilities ranging from local area networks and personal computers to powerful multi-user computers and scientific workstations;
Advice and consultancy services including a Help Desk for the centrally-managed facilities and training courses spanning all types of facility.
9. The Computing Service is organised into five divisions, three primarily concerned with providing centrally-managed facilities and specialised technical support and two concerned with supporting either individual users or institutions.
The Network division looks after the University Data Network (CUDN) and the Granta Backbone Network (GBN), and provides support for institutional networking;
The Systems and Development division is responsible for the PWF and the Pelican archive service;
The Systems and Unix division is responsible for the CUS, the Thor teaching facility, electronic mail and news services and the provision of Unix and VAX/VMS support to individual institutions;
The User Services division has two Sections. Technical User Support is responsible for the Help Desk, training courses and technical support for individual users; Information, Sales and Administration looks after software and documentation sales, purchasing advice, printing and reception;
The Institution Liaison division maintains contact with Heads of Department and other senior staff concerning institutional IT strategies and related matters.
10. The following table gives the estimated cost of each of the individual services which the Computing Service provides, with the previous year's figures in italics. All expenditure is included, whether funded centrally or by means of cost recovery from charged user services, which produce roughly one-fifth of the total (£840K in 1997 compared with £825K in 1996).
1997 (£K) 1996 (£K)
Service Staff Other Total % Total %
Network 467 409 875 22.1% 874 22.0%
Network-related 212 94 306 7.7% 317 8.0%
PWF 248 152 399 10.1% 395 9.9%
CUS 152 83 235 5.9% 244 6.1%
Other centrally-run facilities 136 24 160 4.0% 184 4.6%
Support services 465 383 848 21.4% 818 20.5%
Advice & consultancy 459 62 521 13.2% 490 12.3%
Directorate & liaison 260 103 363 9.2% 392 9.9%
Administration & overheads 143 113 256 6.4% 266 6.7%
TOTAL 2,542 1,422 3,964 100.0% 3,980 100.0%
The following paragraphs discuss each of the services in turn.
Network
Granta Backbone Network
11. The Computing Service continued to carry out all operations for the Granta Backbone Network Management Committee (as described in its annual report). Although the rerouting of GBN cables at the University Library (Aoi Pavilion) was completed, the refurbishment work at Trinity College continued and plans were made for temporary diversions in the coming year on account of work at Applied Mathematics and at two locations on the Sidgwick site; fortunately the design of the GBN usually allows alternate routes to be identified without too much difficulty. Data communications (as discussed in more detail below) continued to be the main use of the GBN, but there was also significant use for private institutional fibre links between physically separate sites and for carrying security camera pictures and building services monitoring information from remote locations back to the University's central control room. The JTMC also installed additional copper cables in the GBN ducts for voice network use.
JANET and SuperJANET
12. The capacity of international links was much improved during the year, both as a result of the first production elements of the Trans-European network at 34 Mbit/s (TEN-34) and the installation of a new 45 Mbit/s link to the USA, although the latter only seemed to move the bottlenecks to the far side of the Atlantic. Cambridge benefitted from the subsequent reorganisation of the SuperJanet SDH network by having an additional 6 Mbit/s channel for IP traffic; a 155 Mbit/s ATM link to the Rutherford Laboratory was also installed, as part of the Europe-wide JAMES network for communications research. The withdrawal of the JANET X.25 service in August 1997 passed off without problems, although the support of local X.25 connections is continuing for the time being and automatic routing to the JANET IP network is being provided for some popular services such as BIDS.
13. The prospect of charging for the use of SuperJANET, combined with the new JANET policy for sponsored connections, is causing the Computing Service to try to rationalise the ad hoc arrangements under which Research Council institutions and other bodies such as the Royal Greenwich Observatory have been using the CUDN to access JANET. Arrangements have also been made for issuing proxy licences to members of conferences who wish to use JANET while they are in Cambridge, usually for electronic mail.
Cambridge University Data Network
14. The table below gives numbers of CUDN connections of various kinds at the end of 1996-97 (with end 1995-96 figures in italics). The numbers of asynchronous and X.25 connections again fell, while practically every institution now has one or more local area networks (LANs) connected by ethernet to the CUDN. Although the Computing Service has no direct knowledge of the equipment connected to the these LANs, some idea of the number of individual computer systems is given by the fact that the total of Internet addresses issued for the University as a whole now stands at over 15,200, having increased by more than one-sixth during the year.
University Data Network
Asynchronous X.25 Ethernet
University 62 156 28 34 79 73
Colleges 8 21 10 10 32 32
External 2 3 14 12
TOTAL 72 180 38 44 125 117
15. The individual LANs are connected to a number of area routers interlinked by GBN fibres to provide the CUDN's filtered ethernet service. Following the success of the previous year's pilot, further steps were taken towards converting this backbone to the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) protocol, which is faster and can also carry several different types of service simultaneously. Two ATM area routers were purchased in January as part of the first phase of the HEFCE LAN/MAN Initiative and the purchase of additional ATM equipment under the second phase was approved in July; the non-ATM equipment is being redeployed to provide additional ports in parts of the network where ethernet speeds are still adequate.
16. The charged Magpie fast modem service proved popular with staff and research students (although less so with undergraduates) and during the year some 1,400 individuals (or their institutions) paid £30 each for up to 250 hours of connect time, the money being used to purchase additional lines and modems as required. Although some congestion was experienced in the Michaelmas Term, it disappeared as the number of ports was gradually increased, to 40 by the end of the year. Further expansion is being planned and the support of ISDN is being investigated.
17. In addition to the developments described above, Network division staff continued with their bread and butter activities of providing CUDN connections and advising institutions on how to wire up buildings, establish local area networks and connect them to the CUDN. The installation backlog was again kept under control throughout the year despite a very high level of demand. In some cases, where there was a need to provide connections for parts of institutions occupying temporary accommodation far away from the main University sites served by the GBN, the Cambridge Cable LANEX fibre service proved very useful.
Network-related services
Electronic Mail
18. The Computing Service operates two electronic mail (email) facilities, the central mail switch and the Hermes networked message store. After the major software and hardware reorganisations and enhancements described in the last Report, Hermes coped well throughout the year, although the peak load increased from 2,750 messages an hour in February 1996 to over 4,000 in June 1997. Since further increases on this scale are anticipated, a new fileserver and two additional processors have been installed in preparation for the new academic year. Some further information on how the load varied during the year is given in the Annex.
19. Personal mail filters for individual users were introduced, also a managed domain service which allows institutions which lack the relevant equipment and/or technical expertise to have a mail domain which is hosted on a Computing Service facility but under their own management. A new mail user agent for Macintoshes, Mulberry, was also introduced. Much time and effort was spent on trying to filter out "spam" (unsolicited and frequently improper email advertising whose content can be very frightening to inexperienced recipients). Blocking out new sources as they come to light is of only limited value against such fast moving targets and the details of other countermeasures have had to be deliberately kept obscure to avoid assisting the "spammers", although this risks causing problems for innocent users. Unfortunately, no-one has yet found a comprehensive solution for this worldwide problem.
Information Services
20. In accordance with Syndicate policy, each institution is encouraged to develop its own Web server and information is only held on the central server until this can be arranged. During the year, data from the University Library, the Development Office and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was moved to local servers while the introduction of a server at the Local Examinations Syndicate was particularly helpful in dealing with Webmaster enquiries. In the other direction, over 70 student societies took advantage of a new facility for keeping their information on the central server, and other new postings included information about Fellowship competitions, the National Science Week, Kettle's Yard and staff training directories. The Information Group also provided much input to the planning for the new Web server at the University Offices (not to mention providing them with trained personnel in the form of the person who stood in while our Web data manager was on maternity leave) and also to the paper and electronic versions of the new University map.
21. The following graphs show the popularity of the central World Wide Web server, which continued to hold both Computing Service material and general University information, including the Board of Graduate Studies prospectus:
Graph Graph
Daily average of all Monthly accesses to
successful accesses Graduate Prospectus
22. Computing Service documentation, both on the Web and in printed form, was updated in line with new developments, including the move of the PWF to Netware 4 (see below). After much planning and consultation, it was decided to make the Computing Service Newsletter a Web based publication and to cease general circulation of the printed version after the July 1997 issue.
23. Requests to the Web server peaked in May, when the daily average of 28,600 requests was about double that of a year earlier; During the year, the number of other servers in the University increased from 75 to 110. The following table compares central Web server activity in July 1997 and 1996:
July 1997 July 1996
Total requests received, total data sent 706 K, 3,580 MB 424 K, 1,775 MB
% requests from Cambridge, rest of UK, rest of world 34%, 12%, 54% 39%, 12%, 49%
Originating computers: University, rest of world 4.4 K, 55.2 K 2.9 K, 38.1 K
24. The investigation of proxy/cache server facilities, which aim to reduce external network usage and improve response times by automatically maintaining local copies of recently referenced Web documents, continued in the form of a pilot trial to evaluate various software options for a full-scale service. In May the proxy/cache server dealt with 1.66 M requests from almost 900 computers in 90 departments and Colleges, with 25% of requests (16% by data volume) being satisfied by documents already present in the cache.
25 The USENET news server continued to remain popular, although it suffered from problems with "spam" in the same way as the electronic mail service. The following table compares the levels of activity in July 1997 and July 1996:
July 1997 July 1996
Monthly news server connections, proportion from the CUS 137 K, 15% 129 K, 16%
Institutions making non-CUS connections, peak connections 109, 135 105, 180
Total, local newsgroups 8,500, 190 7,000, 160
Monthly volume, number of individual postings 12.6 GB, 5.5 M 7.9 GB, 3.5 M
Centrally-managed services
Public Workstation Facility
26. The following table summarises the usage of the PWF in terms of users and sessions for 1996-97 (10 months), with 1995-96 (full year) figures in italics:
Public Workstation Facility
Users Sessions
University 3,161 (48.0%) 3,114 (46.2%) 152,467 (49.7%) 175,767 (47.4%)
Colleges 3,417 (51.8%) 3,614 (53.6%) 152,521 (49.7%) 192,810 (52.0%)
External 13 (0.2%) 17 (0.3%) 2,069 (0.7%) 2,328 (0.6%)
TOTAL 6,591 (100.0%) 6,745 (100.0%) 307,057 (100.0%) 370,905 (100.0%)
Other tables and graphs are to be found in the Annex; note that all undergraduate use is registered under a student's College.
27. The major development this year was the conversion of the PWF server network operating system from Novell Netware version 3 to version 4, which was particularly complex because of the extent of the PWF and its interconnection with College and departmental systems. Planning started in earnest in the Lent term and extensive trials of version 4 were carried out during the Easter vacation. Two working parties were established, one internal to the Computing Service and one including computer support staff from departments and Colleges and the Technical Committee was also involved. The decision to go ahead was taken unanimously at the start of the Easter term and the actual change was made in the first two weeks of August. Thanks to the sterling efforts of the Small Systems Integration Group, it went off without major problems, although the PWF Macintoshes were left connected via Netware version 3 for a time pending the completion of a rewrite of their log-in software.
Central Unix Service
28. The Central Unix Service continued to provide a Unix service to a large number of users in institutions throughout the University using two Sun SPARCserver 1000s with two 20 GB RAID filestores, while the separate SPARCserver-based Thor teaching facility was used for taught Unix-based courses, primarily in science and technology subjects. Towards the end of the year, Thor was enhanced by the addition of a pair of Linux hosts which were funded by Computer Science for use by their students only. The following table presents summary statistical information for the use of the CUS and Thor in 1996-97 (10 months) with those for 1995-96 (full year) in italics.
Central Unix Service Thor
CPU Users CPU Users
University 93.3% 97.8% 5,328 4,771 14.4% 12.1% 141 124
Colleges 6.1% 2.1% 375 340 85.6% 87.9% 482 415
External 0.6% 0.2% 60 57
TOTAL 100.0% 100.0% 5,763 5,168 100.0% 100.0% 623 539
User Administration
29. Planning took place throughout the year for pre-registering new post-graduates on the PWF and Hermes (in addition to new undergraduates) to further reduce the need to issue large numbers of new accounts in the first few hectic days of the new academic year. Post-graduate pre-registration poses new challenges and the Technical Committee proved extremely useful in resolving potential problems such as the rather different requirements of the Colleges and those departments such as Engineering and Computer Science which prefer their graduate students to use in-house mail systems. Data on all prospective postgraduates was collected from the Board of Graduate Studies during the summer and installed in the user database, so that in October it was only necessary to distribute the relevant information to those who turned up (including former Cambridge undergraduates, who kept their old accounts) and to cancel the rest.
30. These developments, together with the additional administrative load caused by the introduction of the charged Magpie service and the need to issue conferences with proxy licences for JANET, instigated an assistant staff reorganisation which resulted in a full-time assistant for the User Administration Manager. During the year, the Manager also co-ordinated investigations into 113 incidents of computer misuse. The police were involved on several occasions and one suspect was actually detained in the User Area; other incidents involved the harrassment of one student by another and one of these ended up in the Summary Court. Fortunately, this year produced no major security incidents requiring bulk password changes.
Pelican data archive service
31. The ATL library which provides the Pelican data archive service (as described in the last Report) continued to function well and is now using the Solaris 2 version of the Epoch software. At the end of the year, the library was storing 89 GB of data (40% up on a year previously) for 842 different users; details are given in the Annex.
Advanced Computing
32. The Computing Service continued to provide facilities management for the Hitachi multiple parallel processor installation (which does not come under the Syndicate but has a separate committee of management) in the form of a senior programmer with a particular interest in advanced computing systems.
Support services
Unix and VMS Support
33. This service provides the managers of institutional Unix based computing facilities with support tailored to their specific requirements and covering several proprietary versions of the operating system - Sun (Solaris 1 and 2), DEC (Digital UNIX), and Silicon Graphics (IRIX) - together with LINUX, a free and very popular Unix-compatible operating system which runs on IBM PCs and a range of other hardware types. UNIX Support provided assistance to over 100 institutions during the year, including Astronomy, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineering, Pharmacology, Physics, Plant Sciences, and Pure Mathematics. Although the number of institutions using the DEC VMS operating system has declined substantially, it remains important in a number of institutions (such as the University Library) and the Computing Service is fortunate in having staff with VMS expertise who can provide relevant assistance when required, although they spend most of their time on other things.
Support for Purchases of Personal Systems
34. Computing Service staff continued to collate information from vendors and other sources and to hold regular meetings with major suppliers so that they could provide both individual users and institutions with advice about the equipment which would best meet their particular requirements and where to buy it most cheaply. Following the success of the second annual Demonstration Day in November 1996, planning is well advanced for the third.
External Hardware Maintenance
35. The Engineering Group continued to offer both a full cover contract service and a non-contract service for repairs undertaken on a best-efforts basis and charged according to the time and materials involved. The following tables summarise the repairs carried out during 1996-97 (10 months), with the figures for the full year 1995-96 in italics. Taking into account the different time periods, the number of contract repairs stayed much the same while the number of non-contract ones showed a significant increase. In general terms the mix of work was much the same, although the number of Macintosh repairs continued to increase; towards the end of the year there was an above average number of monitor faults.
Equipment repaired by Type
Contract Non-Contract
BBC microcomputers 6 6 14 25
IBM PC &c. 228 237 135 189
Apple Macintosh 109 87 210 194
Printers 47 57 38 49
Other Equipment 21 22 46 65
TOTAL 411 409 443 522
Equipment repaired by Institution
Contract Non-Contract
University 340 328 340 417
Colleges 71 81 100 98
External - - 3 7
TOTAL 411 409 443 522
Software Sales
36. This service supplies members of the University and Colleges with a range of charged software at advantageous rates for personal computers and scientific workstations and also administers a University-wide support agreement for Sun workstations. The table below summarises software sales during 1996-97 (10 months), with the figures for the full year 1995-96 in italics. Even in a short year, the number of items supplied (which might be full copies of a software package, upgrades, sets of documentation or maintenance contracts) showed a substantial increase. Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit was once again the single most popular software item, followed closely by Novell Netware, while LAN Workplace for DOS and Microsoft Office each also had over one thousand sales. The presence of the second full-time technician, funded out of sales income, ensured that there was no significant backlog of outstanding orders at any point during the year.
Software Sales Items
Communications 8,586 9,082
Graphics & drawing, statistics 270 384
Office packages & operating systems 11,884 6,912
Programming languages, mathematics/libraries 394 266
Word processing, spreadsheet & databases 1,038 1,215
Miscellaneous 1,219 2,432
Media & manuals 17,161 16,090
TOTAL 40,552 36,381
Printing and Reproduction Service
37. In the year to July 1997 the Xerox Docutech produced a total of 1.8M impressions for the Computer Laboratory (the same as in the previous year) although for a variety of reasons the total produced for external customers fell from 1.2M to 0.8M; ways of reversing this trend are being investigated. In September 1997, all of the existing equipment was replaced by a new Docutech and a colour system with improved performance and scanning capability.
Advice and consultancy
Technical User Support
38. In addition to the Help Desk (see below), Computing Service staff assisted users by means of consultations on a wide range of topics, while the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre (LLCC) combined their highly appreciated specialist consultancy and programming service for literary and humanities computing with looking after the Sidgwick Computing Facility and housing the small two-person Sidgwick support team (one from the Service and one from the School of Arts and Humanities) which co-ordinates computing developments and technical liaison with the Service for all departments on that site. A new server facility, provided in collaboration with the Library, to give users client/server access over the CUDN to the SilverPlatter Medline and MathSci databases proved very successful, especially after a software update installed at Easter greatly improved its reliability.
Consultancy
39. The following table summarises the time spent on all kinds of advice and consultancy work (including the Help Desk) for 1996-97 (10 months), with figures for 1995-96 (full year) in italics. The "External" heading includes both time spent responding to enquiries from outside institutions world-wide and charged specialist work carried out by LLCC. The considerable fall in the total, while in part due to the shorter reporting period and some changes in accounting practice, also reflects the success of the new Help Desk arrangements, which have allowed Service staff to spend more time on unaccounted activities such as TechLink development and less on one-to-one support for individual users.
Consulting Hours
University 4,828 (69.6%) 7,161 (69.2%)
Colleges 1,183 (17.1%) 1,698 (16.4%)
External 922 (13.3%) 1,486 (14.4%)
TOTAL 6,933 (100.0%) 10,345 (100.0%)
Help Desk
40. The following table summarises Help Desk calls for 1996-97 (10 months), with figures for 1995-96 (full year) in italics:
Help Desk Calls
University 8,177 (70.2%) 13,162 (72.7%)
Colleges 2,657 (22.8%) 3,796 (21.0%)
External 816 (7.0%) 1,144 (6.3%)
TOTAL 11,650 (100.0%) 15,383 (100.0%)
Of the calls, 45% (46%) were made in person, 33% (32%) by telephone and 22% (22%) by electronic mail. Although many calls had well known and easily given answers, some were extremely complex; the logging software output shows that 87% (85%) were answered on the spot or later the same day and that only 7% (11%) were still open after two days.
41. The number of calls was down by 26% on the same 10 months in 1995-96. This reflects the new support arrangements, brought in at the beginning of November, which inter alia encouraged users to obtain more front-line advice from the computer support staff in their own institution, who are often more familiar with the background to a user's problem than someone at the central Help Desk. In return, Technical User Support established a "fast track" mechanism called TechLink to provide additional help to local computer support staff and to keep them fully informed about all new developments relating to Computing Service facilities. TechLink has proved very successful and now has approaching 150 members, two mailing lists (one general and one giving details of planned interruptions to services) and a dedicated Web server. Two successful workshops for Techlink members have also been held (on Windows NT and on security issues) and more are planned.
Training
42. The Computing Service provides a wide variety of training on network-related services, centrally-managed services and applications software; this is designed to produce added value by reducing the advice and consultancy load and enabling computer equipment throughout the University to be used more effectively. Courses for academics continued to be advertised jointly with the Committee on Academic Staff Development. Personal training in Novell Netware administration was given to departmental staff who were about to establish new servers in their institution. The modular training courses for assistants were further developed with financial support from the Assistant Staff Office and also extended to include charged sessions for similar staff from the Colleges. In all, 294 people attended 39 standard modular sessions (including one at Physics) and a further 38 five specially commissioned modules at Haematology; in satisfaction surveys most of them rated the courses as "excellent".
43. The steady increase in the number of IBM PC training courses for staff and research students has caused the arrangements for sharing the same classrooms with timetabled undergraduate teaching sessions to come under such increasing pressure that the Computing Service has decided to establish a new PC classroom in the Phoenix Building for training courses only. This will be similar in design to the very successful Balfour Macintosh Room and should be in use by the end of Michaelmas 1997. Following a meeting with the Adviser for Students and Staff with a Disability, the potential demand for courses for the disabled is being investigated.
44. The following tables give a summary of statistical information for 1996-97 (10 months), with figures for 1995-96 (full year) in italics. Courses on the Internet and World Wide Web (including the publishing of Web pages) remained very popular, as did those on personal computer applications such as word-processing and spreadsheets. Some more advanced topics, including simple C programming, also went down well. The teach-yourself courses were expanded to 41 titles (including tutorials on C, C++ and Java) and a total of 415 loans/purchases were made (compared with 305 in 1995-96).
Course Types Sessions Attendances
Computing in Cambridge 3 5 35 89
Personal Computers 21 40 314 1,175
Unix 16 17 580 557
Networking 46 40 1,001 920
Word & Doc. Processing 43 40 774 687
Spreadsheets & Databases 23 11 460 221
Statistical Computing 9 13 208 212
Other courses 9 6 284 76
TOTAL 170 172 3,656 3,937
Course Attendance
Attendances
University 2,841 3,007
Colleges 719 794
External 96 136
TOTAL 3,656 3,937
Directorate and liaison
Institution Liaison
45. The two members of this division continued to provide advice to the Councils of the Schools and to individual institutions, calling on the services of other Service staff, especially from the Directorate, Network Support and Technical User Support, as required. Close liaison was maintained with the University Library by means of regular meetings of separate policy and technical liaison groups, while staff from both organisations were involved with investigating possible technical solutions to the problem of networking CD-ROMs. A survey of academic computing facilities in Colleges which was circulated at the start of the Easter Term generated considerable interest and, at the suggestion of a working party established by the Technical Committee, was extended into an ongoing survey both of facilities in College computer rooms and of Departmental plans for the use of computers in teaching.
46. During the year, two separate pairs of liaison meetings and one joint meeting were organised for College and for Departmental computer staff; all proved very successful. Institution Liaison staff assisted in the selection process for computer staff in over 20 University institutions and Colleges (often following this up by helping integrate the newcomer into the world of Cambridge computing) and complied with requests to attend over 70 School, Departmental and College computer committee meetings.
Report of the Information Technology Syndicate
on the University Computing Service for 1999-2000
Introduction
Syndicate Matters
The Computing Service
Charged Network Traffic and JANET Bandwidth
EastNet
Managed Cluster Service
Videoconferencing Service
Data Protection Act 1998
Network Security
Network
JANET and SuperJANET
Cambridge University Data Network
Granta Backbone Network
Network-related services
Electronic Mail
Information Services
Centrally-managed services
Public Workstation Facility
Central Unix Service
User Administration
Pelican data archive service
Advanced Computing
Support services
Software Sales
External Hardware Maintenance
Printing and Reproduction Service
Photography & Illustration Service
Advice and consultancy
Technical User Services
Consultancy, Help Desk and Techlink
Training
Unix Support
Support for Purchases of Personal Systems
Directorate and liaison
Institution Liaison
Statistical Annexe
Introduction
1. This report from the Information Technology Syndicate, which develops computing policy for the University and the Colleges and supervises the University Computing Service, covers the year from August 1999 to July 2000. The printed version of the Statistical Annex gives only top level summaries of the use of services but breakdowns to the level of individual institutions are available on the World Wide Web at http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/itsyndicate/annrep/stats99.00.html. Please note that the statistical information is not intended to be fully comprehensive but only to give a general picture of the width and volume of Service activities.
Syndicate Matters
2. The Syndicate continued to function well and effectively under the chairmanship of Professor Longair, while as chairman of the Technical Committee Dr Heath ensured that it continued to provide extremely useful input on a wide range of issues. Professor Handy, who had served on the Syndicate since its establishment in 1991 (and before that on the Computer Syndicate) resigned during the Long Vacation. Towards the end of the year, in order to provide improved liaison on financial issues, the College representation was changed from three persons appointed by the Senior Tutors' Committee to two appointed by that Committee and one appointed by the Bursars' Committee.
3. Issues discussed by the Syndicate and dealt with in more detail later in this report included charged network traffic, outgoing JANET bandwidth, the EastNET regional network, the Managed Cluster Service and the videoconferencing service. The Syndicate also discussed and agreed an updated version of the University Software Policy, new guidelines on the use of bulk email and changes to the existing guidelines to cover the downloading from the Web of copyright material such as digitally formatted versions of music or films. Reports were also received on the lifetime email service being offered to graduates by the Development Office with the support of the Management Information Services Division of the University Offices.
4. The Syndicate returned on several occasions to the difficulties of recruiting good young computer support staff and concluded that, although the greater freedom now permitted within the present scales on appointment and promotion had gone some way towards solving the worst of the immediate problems, it was essential that the new Director of Personnel should lose no time in proceeding with his planned major review of Computer Officer salaries as a whole. And while the Syndicate was pleased to see the central bodies accept its proposals for a single Appointments Committee for all graduate computer staff appointments, considerable concern was expressed about the delay in their implementation.
5. In the summer of 2001, the academic side of the Computer Laboratory is scheduled to move to West Cambridge, taking the name with it but leaving the Computing Service behind; before then, it will be necessary for the University both to agree the necessary changes to Ordinances and to re-allocate the accommodation which will be released on the New Museums Site. In this context, the Syndicate discussed and approved proposals for the changes to Ordinances and also agreed to support the Computing Service bid for additional space, which includes moving the undergraduate teaching rooms from the Old Music School to a more convenient location next to existing Service accommodation, making an additional computer room and using the top floors of the Austin Building for offices for Service staff relocated from parts of the building being vacated by the Laboratory as a whole, for relieving the present extreme shortage of office accommodation generally and to replace the existing common room.
The Computing Service
6. The facilities and services provided by the Computing Service include:
Necessarily University-wide services, including networks and electronic mail;
Centrally-managed services such as the Public Workstation Facility (PWF) and the Central Unix Service (CUS), which provide any member of the University who needs them with access to facilities of a kind which institutions often provide in-house for their own staff and students;
Support services for institutional and individually-owned facilities ranging from local area networks and personal computers to powerful multi-user computers and scientific workstations;
Advice and consultancy services including a Help Desk for the centrally-managed facilities, the Techlink support scheme for local computer staff and a wide range of training courses.
7. During the year, the staff and facilities of the former Systems and Development division were divided between the Network and Systems and Unix divisions, while Technical User Support and User Services became separate divisions in their own right. This produced a Computing Service made up of five divisions, two managing central facilities and providing specialised technical support and three supporting users, either individually or by institution.
The Network division is responsible for the University Data Network (CUDN), the Granta Backbone Network (GBN), support for institutional networking, the PWF and the Managed Cluster Service;
The Systems and Unix division is responsible for the CUS, the Thor teaching facility, electronic mail and news services, Unix support to individual institutions and the Pelican archive service;
The Technical User Support division is responsible for the Help Desk and the Techlink scheme for local computer support staff, training courses, general technical user support and the Hardware Maintenance and Videoconferencing services.
The User Services division is responsible for information provision, user administration, Software Sales, hardware purchasing advice and the Printing and Photography & Illustration services;
The Institution Liaison division maintains contact concerning institutional IT strategies and related matters with Heads of Department, other senior managers and local computer support staff.
8. The following table summarises the estimated cost of various types of service provided by the Computing Service, distinguishing central funding (UEF and equipment grant) from costs met by charging users (with combined 1999 figures in italics). The cost recovery services account for £1.58M (30% of the total) compared with £1.32M in 1999 and £1.47M in 1998.
2000 (£K)
Centrally Funded Cost Rec'y Combined Total
Service Staff Other Total % 2000 1999
Network 488 73 560 15.3% 360 920 902
Network-related 347 120 467 12.8% 30 497 504
PWF 228 166 394 10.7% 394 344
CUS & Thor 147 88 235 6.4% 235 252
Other centrally-run facilities 219 10 229 6.2% 18 248 209
Software sales 86 0 86 2.3% 750 836 725
Other charged support services 290 12 302 8.2% 421 722 534
Advice & consultancy 615 50 666 18.2% 666 674
Directorate & liaison 287 111 398 10.9% 398 360
Administration & overheads 177 151 327 8.9% 327 281
TOTAL 2,885 780 3,665 100.0% 1,578 5243 4785
Some of the major developments during the year are discussed immediately below, followed by paragraphs about each of the individual services.
Charged Network Traffic and JANET Bandwidth
9. From August 1999, individual institutions were charged for their share of the cost of the incoming transatlantic SuperJANET traffic. Total traffic increased by over 70% on the previous year, but, because the JISC charges for individual HEIs had been fixed on the basis of usage in 1998-99, the largest cost to any individual Cambridge institution (all the top four and seven of the top ten being Colleges) was only £6,300. The same charging mechanism has been retained for 2000-01, although with a rather smaller charge for Cambridge as a whole.
10. Although a number of Colleges have asked to be supplied with a breakdown of transatlantic charges to the level of individual users, the Computing Service is not able to do this. The amount paid to JANET for providing the institutional breakdown is already quite large and increasing the number of IP address ranges ("buckets") from a few hundreds to tens of thousands would make the cost prohibitive. And although the Service's snapshot monitoring software could be developed to produce reliable breakdowns of all incoming (or outgoing) JANET traffic, this would not solve the problem of assigning transatlantic traffic costs accurately to individuals because the actual routes taken by international network transfers are sufficiently unpredictable to produce significant uncertainty about exactly which parts of the total data arriving in Cambridge actually formed part of the charged traffic.
11. The general increase in network traffic also caused problems when the 8 Mbps limit on outgoing traffic from the CUDN into JANET began to be exceeded, sometimes for hours at a time. (There was typically twice as much incoming traffic, but JANET only places controls on transfers into the network.) Investigation showed that the extra traffic was largely due to new types of student recreational computing, including transfers of MP3 music files and DVD films. The use of Napster and similar products, which automatically compile indexes of files on individual workstations logged on to them and then encourage individual users to download the files they want direct from another user's machine, was a particular worry, both because of the amount of bandwidth taken up and because of the potential for widespread breach of copyright, which had already led to court actions against some US universities.
12. The Napster problem received much publicity in the student press, while Computing Service and local computer support staff put considerable effort into identifying the originators of particularly large transfers and either persuading them to change their ways or taking away their CUDN connection. In addition, a small amount of additional JANET bandwidth was purchased for a period including the Easter Term. Although these measures dealt successfully with the immediate problem, the IT Syndicate was sufficiently concerned about the longer term impact on networking to refer the issue to the Senior Tutors' and Bursars' Committees.
EastNet
13. As the result of a successful bid for funding under the second phase of the HEFCE Metropolitan Area Network Initiative, during the latter half of the year procurement was in progress for a regional network to be known as EastNet. This will together link seven universities (Cambridge, Anglia Polytechnic, Cranfield, East Anglia, Essex, Hertfordshire and Luton) plus Homerton and Writtle College (Chelmsford), will be owned by the Association of Universities in the Eastern Region and will have its JANET connection at Cambridge (in the Computing Service). The network is expected to be in service by the end of March 2001 and, together with SuperJANET IV, should increase the total bandwidth to and from Cambridge by a factor approaching two orders of magnitude.
Managed Cluster Service
14. The Managed Cluster Service (MCS) enables institutions to reduce the running costs of their general-access computer rooms by having the Computing Service install and manage both the Novell NetWare servers and software for the individual PCs and Macintoshes. This software consists of the standard PWF classroom software with optional additional applications by mutual agreement; the Service installs it, but the institution meets all licence costs and both procures and pays for any necessary hardware. A detailed service definition which includes these and all other Service and institutional responsibilities was drawn up in collaboration with the early user institutions and approved by the Syndicate. The Service makes an annual charge to institutions using the MCS; the amount depends on the cluster size and the income is primarily used to fund additional staff to run the service.
15. A very successful pilot scheme involving Downing, Newnham, Peterhouse, Land Economy and Veterinary Medicine started in the summer of 1999. By September 2000, the older PWF clusters in Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, the Computer Laboratory and the Clinical School (some established as long ago as 1989) had been brought into the scheme, and further clusters added at St Catharine's, Archaeology, Social and Political Sciences, Fitzwilliam, Gonville and Caius and Queens' and a large Arts and Humanities installation in four departments on the Sidgwick Site. Since several other institutions are already interested in joining, the future rate of growth of the MCS seems to be limited only by the considerable load which taking new institutions on board places on the relevant Service staff.
Videoconferencing Service
16. Soon after the launch of this service in October 1998, it become apparent that the studio in the Old Examination Hall was both too small (at most four to six people) and badly located for the out-of-hours use often needed for international sessions. Fortunately, it was possible to construct a larger facility (taking up to 25 people) next to the security control room in the Cockcroft Building and the service moved there at Christmas 1999, using the old video equipment but adding a capability for handling both ISDN2 and ISDN6 calls. The new room greatly stimulated demand and was used for 71 sessions (138 hours) between January and July, whereas in the previous 19 months the old room had only been used 49 times (82 hours).
17. Call destinations included the UK, seven other European countries, the USA and seven more countries world-wide. The service was used by Millennium Mathematics Project to allow Cambridge lecturers to set tasks to school pupils in London and South Africa and receive the results at later sessions and by the Board of Continuing Education to record a set of 12 lectures in Criminology for presentation in Russia. More common uses included PhD vivas, student interviews and research group meetings, while the Personnel Division booked a whole day for a staff recruitment, with some interviewees appearing in person and others by videoconference.
Data Protection Act 1998
18. This Act came into force on 1 March, although most existing computing activities have a transitional exemption until October 2001. The Computing Service supplied a member of a working party which reported to Council in July on the general implications of the Act and also set up an internal task force to discuss both what actions were required and how to advise users. The new Act covers all personal data on computers and also that in many manual files, but most Service uses of personal data were already covered by the 1984 Act. The main need for change arises because putting personal data on the World Wide Web now effectively requires the explicit consent of the data subject. Arrangements have therefore been put in hand to ensure that from October 2001 the Service's Web-based look-up system will only supply email addresses for those users who have already given the relevant permission.
Network Security
19. Previous reports have emphasised the problems caused when unidentified intruders from anywhere in the world succeed in gaining unauthorised access to the CUDN and the computers attached to it. During the year, Computing Service staff continued the regular friendly probing of all computers connected to the network, to identify instances of known security weaknesses and to feed back the results and recommendations for remedial action to local computer support staff. When this system was demonstrated to other universities at a security conference, much interest was shown in it and the Unix Support team subsequently received Technology Applications Programme funding to develop the software and make it easier to transfer to other sites.
20. While there were many "unfriendly" probes, none succeeded in causing a major security breach on a main Computing Service system. Incoming traffic was blocked on several ports which had been heavily used for probing, with exceptions being made for particular host destinations with a valid need. Thanks to the vigilance of the local Computer Emergency Response Team, advance warnings from JANET-CERT and other sources, and fast footwork by the email team and other Service staff, few University users were troubled either by the probing or by the "LoveBug" virus and its successors which received so much publicity in May and June. To keep up this satisfactory state of affairs, it is essential that not only the CERT but everyone involved in systems management for machines connected to the CUDN should not drop their guard and should keep their software up to date.
Network
JANET and SuperJANET
21. At the beginning of the year, the design of the connection to JANET was changed so that when the main JANET link to London goes down it does not also cut access between the University and local institutions with their own JANET connections, such as Homerton and the Sanger Centre. Two lengthy periods of downtime in December and January were due to human error by Cable and Wireless staff and produced a letter of apology from UKERNA, while the effects of a number of similar but shorter outages in June were ameliorated because the use of an independent 64 Kbps ISDN link was successful in maintaining an email service.
Cambridge University Data Network
22. The Annex contains details of numbers of CUDN connections at the end of the year. The withdrawal of the last asynchronous and X.25 connections in October left a network made up mostly of ethernet connections at 100 Mbps or more (fast) or 10 Mbps or less (slow). During the year, the number of fast lines increased from 22 to 48 while that of the slow ones fell from 119 to 94. By themselves, these numbers give little idea of the overall size and complexity of the CUDN, because the end user equipment is connected via extensive local area networks (LANs) covering a whole building or even a whole department. A better indicator of size is the total of Internet addresses issued for the University and Colleges, which was 36,500 at the end of 1999-2000 (compared with 29,500 in 1998-99 and 18,900 in 1997-98). Although not all the addresses are used for networked personal computers, the total clearly reflects the near ubiquity of these machines at all levels and in all parts of the University and the Colleges.
23. The institutional ethernet links are connected to a backbone network of area routers interlinked by GBN fibres. During the year much effort was put into increasing CUDN resilience and making it easier to track down faults by simplifying the structure of the backbone, replacing some older equipment and providing at least two paths to each area router. Unfortunately, the need to respond to the continuing demand for higher bandwidth, as evinced by the installation of a pilot Gigabit ethernet (1000 Mbps) link between the New Museums and Downing sites, tends to run counter to these good intentions. Meanwhile, the ability to use Virtual LAN techniques with the new routers enabled the Managed Cluster Service to connect remote clusters to the central site by means of a "logical backbone" rather than IP tunnelling.
24. During the year, Network Support staff provided advice to individual institutions on over 170 occasions (covering topics such as how to wire up buildings, establish LANs and connect them to the CUDN) while the Network Installation team carried out or supervised over 30 new or upgraded fast ethernet connections, several relocations and temporary connections, optical fibre installation work at 25 sites and copper wiring at over 40. While total Magpie registrations were slightly down at 2,100, the V.90 56 Kbps service settled down and an ISDN service was introduced. In a continuing programme of avoiding congestion, 30 more fast lines were added in November and a further 30 (making 120 in all) are due by October 2000.
Granta Backbone Network
25. Network staff again handled all operational matters for the GBN Management Committee. In a year dominated by building projects, the new Mathematics building at Clarkson Road was provided with three GBN connections (for the CUDN, security and a private link to Mill Lane), new ducts and cables were installed outside the footprint of a new building at St Edmunds and negotiations continued about a new route for the installation of cables into Chemistry once the Unilever building work has been completed. At West Cambridge, long term plans were agreed for the provision of separate GBN nodes for each of its individual sub-sites, while in the short term the widening of the access road required the diversion and re-routing of all the existing GBN cables in that area. Finally, after many years of waiting, a GBN connection is to be installed at Homerton as part of the EastNet project.
Network-related services
Electronic Mail
26 During the year, the Hermes mailstore delivered over twice the volume of mail as in 1998-99 (320 GB compared with 150 GB), although there were only 50% more individual messages. In June, two Sun E220R systems were installed to provide extra processing power for the two years or so left before the ever-increasing load will necessitate major changes to the underlying structure of Hermes. Although the rash of email viruses in May required considerable expenditure of staff and machine resources on detecting and filtering them, thanks to the recruitment of a second member of staff at the start of the year, it was still possible to introduce some locally written software for automatic transparent indexing within Hermes mail folders and this substantially improved overall performance, especially for larger folders.
Information Services
27. Following the release of the Web-based help system for the PWF in October, the Information Group reviewed the printed documentation and decided to publish fewer leaflets on paper and more only on the Web. New subjects included advice on email attachments, on the construction of email lists and on how, when (and when not) to use bulk email in an acceptable manner. Advantage was taken of the opportunity to use reserve Computing Service funds to recruit an additional person to work on documentation. In addition to dealing with over 1,000 enquiries to Webmaster each quarter, the Technical Librarians reorganised the staff library and set up user libraries for the new Managed Cluster Service installations.
28. The Computing Service Web server continued to hold updated versions of much general University material, including the undergraduate prospectus, items from Continuing Education and information (now including pictures) about our museums and collections, although the postgraduate prospectus was transferred to the server at the University Offices. Service staff continued to provide input to the University Web Site Steering Committee and to organise useful and well attended courses and meetings for local Webmasters. The Web search engine which produces a single index of the contents of all relevant local servers so that material can be found without reference to the internal structure of the University was again heavily used, especially as the information providers learnt how to present their data in ways which make user searches easier. The following table compares use in July in 2000 and 1999:
July 2000 July 1999
Servers, documents indexed 269, 267 K 226, 180 K
Total searches, data sent, 90 K, 1.8 GB 64 K, 1.3 GB
% requests from Cambridge, rest of UK, rest of world 22%, 15%, 63% 22%, 16%, 62%
Originating computers: University, rest of world 4.4 K, 21.1 K 3.1 K, 14.3 K
29. During the year, requests to the main Computing Service Web site (www.cam.ac.uk) came from over 180 country-level domains and totalled 49.1 M (compared to 29.8 M in 1998-99), with a daily peak of 216 K. The server hosted pages for over 150 University societies, while 25 bodies took advantage of the separate managed Web service server for those institutions which are capable of authoring pages but do not need to run their own server. The following table compares main server activity during July in 2000 and 1999:
July 2000 July 1999
Total requests received, total data sent 3.7 M, 17.0 GB 2.3 M, 9.7 GB
% requests from Cambridge, rest of UK, rest of world 42%, 10%, 48% 44%, 10%, 46%
Originating computers: University, rest of world 10.7 K, 118.0 K 8.5 K, 85.7 K
30. Local and national cache server facilities aim to reduce external network use by automatically maintaining copies of recently referenced Web documents. The local cache continued to work well, and in February support was added for the Web Proxy Auto-discovery Protocol (WPAD). This provides an automated way for web browsers to locate and use the cache and, despite some problems with current browser implementations, increased the number of client systems by over 1,000. The table compares cache activity for July in 2000 and 1999:
July 2000 July 1999
Total requests received, total data volume 61.8 M, 465 GB 27.2 M, 206 GB
% hits (requests), % hits (data volume) 48.3%, 19.3% 44.7%, 21.7%
Client systems, client domains 6652, 150 4529, 138
In October, the build up of load caused problems with the national cache. To provide local users with an acceptable service, Computing Service staff continuously monitored the situation and disabled Cambridge use of the national cache at times of particularly bad performance (although fetching more material directly increased the charged transatlantic traffic). Making large-scale caches work well is still a rather black art, and the enhancement efforts of the national cache team were not wholly successful until well into the Lent Term.
32. The USENET news service continued to function well and reliably and, by giving Cambridge users access to thousands of local and world-wide news groups, was able to disseminate information on, and provide a forum for the discussion of, a very wide range of topics. The following table compares the levels of activity during July in 2000 and 1999:
July 2000 July 1999
News server connections: monthly total, peak rate 232 K, 164 160 K, 112
Total, local newsgroups 13.7 K, 229 12.9 K, 218
Monthly volume, number of individual postings 19.1 GB, 9.2 M 20.0 GB, 8.8 M
Centrally-managed services
Public Workstation Facility
33. Although the Managed Cluster Service (see above) stole the limelight, the Small Systems Group (including those new staff financed from MCS income) and Operations Group were also kept busy maintaining and updating the underlying PWF system. The policy of rolling out a new basic NT image each quarter generally went very well, although a tiresome (and fairly common world-wide) problem with broken user NT roaming profiles required them to be automatically scanned for and mended nightly. New PCs were installed in the Phoenix Teaching Room and User Area and the old (but still very useful) systems were reused for application servers and seats at the Oriental Studies Basement cluster. New equipment was also purchased for the user filestore, tape backup and systems/applications software maintenance.
34. It became very evident during 1999 that the part of the Long Vacation which is available for major PWF enhancements is shrinking as more institutions use their clusters for taught courses during September, so that in future more of the work must be done at a different time. In another attempt to ease the same problem, course givers planning to use new or updated PWF application software were required to submit formal requests well in advance. During the year separate pilot projects for possible Windows Terminal Servers and Novell Netware 5 implementations were started but when each ran into unexpected problems it was decided to defer any further work and transfer the resources temporarily to the Managed Cluster Service. The following table summarises PWF users and sessions for 1999-2000, with figures for 1998-99 in italics. (N.B. The College registered users include all undergraduates.)
Public Workstation Facility
Users Sessions
University 4,530 (51.1%) 3,936 (44.4%) 409,275 (50.0%) 322,718 (48.1%)
Colleges 4,300 (48.5%) 4,915 (55.4%) 405,681 (49.5%) 344,816 (51.4%)
External 27 (0.3%) 17 (0.2%) 4,401 (0.5%) 2,982 (0.4%)
TOTAL 8,857 (100.0%) 8,868 (100.0%) 819,537 (100.0%) 670,516 (100.0%)
Central Unix Service
35. The Central Unix Service is widely used by researchers throughout the University while the related Thor facility supports (primarily science and technology) Unix-based taught courses. By replacing its two rather obsolete SPARCserver 1000s with three Sun E220R systems the CUS processing power was increased by several times, to more what one might expect of a system with over 4,000 users, while the installation of a new fileserver backup device made it possible to significantly increase disc space quotas on the fileservers installed in the previous year. Although the main Thor system was not changed, a pilot project was started to provide Linux on the Computer Science PWF cluster (with the possibility of extension to other clusters in due course). The following table presents summary statistical information for the use of the CUS and Thor in 1999-2000, with that for 1998-99 in italics:
Central Unix Service Thor
CPU Users CPU Users
University 90.5% 92.1% 3,715 4,713 15.7% 23.9% 112 134
Colleges 8.8% 6.4% 428 504 84.3% 76.1% 351 443
External 0.7% 1.4% 49 53
TOTAL 100.0% 100.0% 4,192 5,270 100.0% 100.0% 463 577
User Administration
36. In August and September 1999, the pre-registrations of new postgraduates (3,500) and undergraduates (also 3,500) were each completed successfully within days. Later in the year, electronic data feeds were also used to reduce the administrative load of students staying on for a further degree, of postgraduate cancellations and of International Summer School registrations. Staff greatly appreciated the lack of any need for bulk password changes. The User Administration manager served on the Student Data Model Working Party.
37. Although there were no major security breaches on central systems (see above), over 500 security and other incidents were reported (well up on 1998-99). All were investigated as potential security problems (about 10% turned out to be false alarms) and reports were passed on to JANET-CERT when appropriate. The external probing was mixed with many incidents originating nearer to home, including "spam" (unwanted bulk emails, including ill-targeted recruitment attempts by external companies), offensive and harassing email, and "warez" (sites selling pirated software). Several guilty students had their email accounts suspended (and were usually very indignant at the need to come in to the Computing Service to have them restored).
Pelican data archive service
38. In December, transferring the Pelican data archive service from robot-driven tapes to a farm of discs went extremely smoothly, with essentially no interruption to normal service; the tape robot is still in use for handling backup. A welcome side effect of the change is that retrievals are quicker because there is no need to wait for tape loading and repositioning. The Service continued to be widely used, especially by the University Library for projects including the storage of scanned photographic data. By July 2000, the archive was storing 166 GB of data (compared to 136 GB a year earlier) for 949 different users (923).
Advanced Computing
39. The Hitachi multiple parallel processor project comes under a separate committee of management, but the Computing Service has continued to provide it with the services of a senior programmer with a particular interest in advanced computing systems.
Support services
Software Sales
40. Software Sales supplies members of the University with competitively priced software through CHEST (Combined HE Software Team) or other deals and administers University-wide support agreements for Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations. Users can consult a Web version of the software product catalogue and send order enquiries directly from its pages. The table below summarises sales for 1999-2000, with the figures for 1998-99 in italics.
Software Sales Items
Communications 598 850
Graphics & drawing, statistics 2,626 1,041
Office packages, operating systems/utilities 7,702 6,091
Programming languages, mathematics/libraries 698 611
Word processing, spreadsheets, databases 2,307 2,291
Geographic, miscellaneous 1,169 609
SunSpectrum/Silicon Graphics 556 610
TOTAL 15,656 12,103
41. In November, the Syndicate considered the relative costs and risks of obtaining site licences under Microsoft's Campus Agreement or continuing with their Select scheme (which is due to end in November 2001), and decided (like most Russell Group universities) to delay taking any firm decision. The Computing Service felt it must take part in the new 5-year CHEST deal for NAG products, not only to save money on new purchases but also to legitimise the many copies already in use, mostly in scientific departments; after some discussion, the relevant Schools all agreed to contribute a share of the annual cost. The total number of items supplied increased significantly, while from October onwards, major staff changes and the consequent training needs adversely affected the rate of dealing with user orders. However by Easter 2000, normal service had been resumed with 70 to 90 % of ordered items being supplied either immediately or within a week and 95 to 99% within four weeks.
External Hardware Maintenance
42. The Engineering Group provides institutions and individuals with either a full cover contract service or repairs charged on a time and materials basis. Successful warranty repairs were carried out on Viglen and Avantek PC systems and the group achieved Apple's "Self-Service Organisation" status, thereby gaining recognition as official repairers for Macintosh equipment throughout the University (including warranty repairs) and obtaining improved access to technical information and spare parts. The following tables summarise the work carried out during 1999-2000, with figures for 1998-99 in italics; although there was little change as regards contract repairs, the number of non-contract repairs went up by over 60% (and within that total the number of laptop repairs increased by over 260%).
Equipment repaired by Type
Contract Non-contract
IBM PC &c. 125 123 152 95
Apple Macintosh 55 74 157 130
Printers 73 68 126 73
Laptops 9 4 259 97
Other equipment 117 109 136 108
TOTAL 379 378 830 503
Equipment repaired by Institution
Contract Non-contract
University 258 267 571 359
Colleges 121 111 251 136
External 8 8
TOTAL 379 378 830 503
Printing and Reproduction Service
43. The Xerox Docutech, the Xerox and Agfa colour machines and the booklet making machine all worked reliably, but total use continued to decline (which will impact planning for after the Computer Laboratory moves out). During the year, the Docutech service produced a total of 0.75M impressions for the Computing Service (down from 0.9M in 1998-99), 0.72M for the Computer Laboratory (0.78M) and 0.52M for external customers (0.73M). Colour copy totals were: Service 12K (13K); Laboratory 1K (3K); external customers 13.5K (38K).
Photography & Illustration Service
44. The overall volume of work this year was very similar to 1998-99. The service dealt with 8,800 rolls of E6 film, produced 166,000 colour prints, 10,800 computer generated, 5,000 duplicate and 400 diazo slides and made up 3,700 more slides from artwork supplied by customers, while over 1,000 posters were produced (up from 900 in 1998-99) and display boards were loaned out on a number of occasions. Staff continued to take photographs at Congregations, both inside the Senate House and on the Lawn, and were very happy to have the intensity of the General Admission work reduced by being spread over three days rather than two. Some specialist photographic work was also undertaken. A high speed 35 mm film scanner and a replacement mounting and encapsulating machine were purchased.
Advice and consultancy
Technical User Services
45. Technical User Services (TUS) staff operate the Consultancy, Help Desk and Techlink services (see below) and also maintain a wide range of application software on the PWF and other Computing Service facilities. At the start of the year, the pilot WINS server for Microsoft name lookup was converted into a production service. The Windows NT support service for PCs was formally announced in October and made good progress until its leader resigned in April; recruiting a direct replacement proved very difficult and the eventual solution involved much closer integration between this service and the Help Desk. With the help of the Small Systems group, a two-day workshop on Windows NT and ZENworks was organised for the benefit of those local computer staff planning to roll out NT workstation at their institution.
46. Dealing with viruses, distributing anti-virus software via the Web and otherwise, and increasing user awareness of the need to install it and keep it up to date continued to be major activities, especially given the replacement of Dr Solomon's AntiVirus Toolkit by VirusScan and Virex from April and the appearance of the "LoveBug" virus and its variants in May and June. The joint Computing Service/Library Electronic Reference Library system was moved to a larger Sun E250 system and an experimental Z39.50 interface was provided. Three new databases (EconLit, ATLA Religion and The Philosopher's Index) were added to the existing six (Medline, Mathsci, GeoBase, Georef, PsycLit and Criminal Justice Abstracts). Once again, Medline was by far the most widely and heavily used, although the largest monthly connect time for the latest version was only 2,200 hours compared with 2,500 in 1998-99.
Consultancy, Help Desk and Techlink
47. Staff from TUS give general user consultations on a wide range of topics while the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre (LLCC) provides a specialist service for the humanities; TUS also provides a member of the support team which co-ordinates computing developments and technical liaison with the Computing Service for the whole of the Sidgwick site. The following table summarises the time spent on all kinds of advice and consultancy work (including the Help Desk) for 1999-2000, with 1998-99 figures in italics. The "External" heading includes both charged specialist work carried out by LLCC for University institutions and the time spent by other staff responding to enquiries from outside institutions world-wide.
Consulting Hours
University 4,166 (60.3%) 5,141 (58.5%)
Colleges 1,260 (18.2%) 1,408 (16.0%)
External 1,482 (21.5%) 2,223 (25.4%)
TOTAL 6,908 (100.0%) 8,782 (100.0%)
48. The following table summarises Help Desk calls for 1999-2000, with 1998-99 figures in italics:
Help Desk Calls
University 7,142 (71.2%) 9,809 (75.8%)
Colleges 2,565 (25.6%) 2,852 (22.0%)
External 319 (3.2%) 277 (2.1%)
TOTAL 10,026 (100.0%) 12,938 (100.0%)
There seem to be three reasons for the significantly reduced activity compared to the previous year: the success of the policy of encouraging users to direct their initial enquiries to local computer support staff rather than to the Help Desk, the lack this year of the need for advisory activity associated with serious security breaches and, towards the end of the year, the need for many local staff to concentrate on the introduction of the CAPSA accounting system, which has its own Help Desk manned by the Management Information Services Division.
49. Only 32% of calls were made in person, with 39% by telephone and 29% by email; a significantly different pattern from 1996-97, when the corresponding figures were 45%, 33% and 22%. Over 80% of calls were closed within 1 hour and over 90% with two days while, as in 1998-99, some 3% of the calls were referred to local computer staff when Help Desk staff could not provide a ready answer to a question about a non-Computing Service facility. At quieter times, and as a welcome change, the technicians who man the Help Desk began to assist with user training courses, documentation and fault report investigation for PC Support.
50. As a quid pro quo for the Computing Service policy of directing users towards their local computer support staff, the Techlink scheme provides those staff with "fast track" backup and general support. The scheme remains very popular, and had over 260 members in July (240 in July 1999), who were responsible for 13.4% of all Help Desk calls (12.3% in 1998-99) and, because their questions tend to be more difficult, for 21.8% (19.3%) of the total time spent answering calls. By popular demand, the previous year's weekly programme of fairly elementary "troubleshooting" seminars was repeated during the Michaelmas and Lent terms.
Training
51. Providing training courses on central services and popular applications software reduces the advice and consultancy load and enables computer equipment throughout the University to be used more effectively. In October, so many courses became full even allowing for standby places that the Web booking system had to be changed to reject attempts to register for oversubscribed sessions. Some courses were moved to a larger venue and some repeat sessions were delivered; HTML was particularly popular and its introductory course was given five times in the term. Demand remained high all year, almost all bookings were made remotely (mostly via the Web but with some by email), turnout rates approached 80% and exit surveys showed over 90% of customers to be satisfied with the courses as given. For Michaelmas 2000, all relevant courses are being rewritten to use Microsoft Office 2000. The table summarises course information for 1999-2000, with 1998-99 figures in italics.
Course Types
Sessions Attendances
Personal Computers 17 19 291 350
Unix 14 12 858 464
Networking 58 53 1,363 1,055
Word & Doc. Processing 41 38 826 910
Spreadsheets & Databases 34 32 1,064 1,014
Statistical Computing 7 8 282 322
Other courses 4 6 252 265
TOTAL 175 168 4,936 4,380
Course Attendance
Attendances
University 3,686 3,344
Colleges 1,087 928
External 163 108
TOTAL 4,936 4,380
52. In September and March, our Dr Hazel, author of the widely used Exim email software, gave two very successful one-day workshops which attracted a total of over 200 participants from academic and commercial institutions, both in the UK and abroad. In the Long Vacation 2000, three fully-subscribed charged courses on Windows NT (one on server administration and two on security) were given by an outside trainer. The modular training courses provided for assistant staff with financial support from the Personnel Division remained popular, although numbers fell slightly to 176 people at 23 sessions (compared with 243 at 27 in 1998-99). The corresponding figures for the similar courses given on a charged basis to staff from Colleges were 167 people at 18 sessions (220 at 25). Loans and sales from the self-teaching courseware library continued to increase, with the most popular products being those on keyboard skills, creating Web pages, Microsoft Access and C.
Unix Support
53. With a full complement of staff throughout this year and rather less need to spend time on closing security loopholes or rescuing users with hacked systems, the group was able to support new developments such as the managed Web server service and the Computer Science Linux service (for both see above). The group also developed, and gave on three separate occasions, a week long hands-on course in Linux System Administration. There was very great demand for this course and it was greatly appreciated by the local computer support staff who attended it. The course also enabled the Unix Support staff to get over a great deal of useful information at one go rather than in many individual one-on-one sessions.
Support for Purchases of Personal Systems
54.This service advises both individual users and institutions about personal computer systems for particular needs and where to buy them most cheaply, using vendor information and the feedback obtained from regular meetings with the major suppliers. In November, at the fourth Demonstration Day, hundreds of University users again crowded into the Small Examination Hall to see a wide range of hardware and software vendors exhibit their wares.
Directorate and liaison
Institution Liaison
55. The two staff of this division liaise on computing matters at institution level with senior management and computer support staff, calling on assistance from the Directorate, Network Support and Technical User Services as required. During the year, QAA assessors began to place increasing emphasis on IT resources for student learning and, at the request of the General Board officer arranging their visits, Institution Liaison staff began to assist both by attending the Learning Resources meeting with each team and by arranging for Small Systems staff to show one or more of the assessors around the central PWF classrooms. These steps seem to have been very worthwhile as since they started few QAA visits have resulted in the award of anything other than maximum marks. In both this and other contexts, the division's annual survey of College student computing facilities, which is repeated each Easter Term and again achieved a 100% response rate, is proving to be extremely valuable.
56. Institution Liaison organise both the very popular meetings of departmental and College computer staff and regular meetings to discuss matters of mutual interest between the Computing Service and the Library and, starting this year, between the Service and the Management Information Services Division. Other meetings which were attended by staff dealt with subjects as diverse as the final stages of the Year 2000 Working Party, therefurbishment of the Raised Faculty Building, the selection of the Library's replacement automation system, IT facilities at the new Betty and Gordon Moore Library and what EMBS should recommend about energy saving to personal computer users. During the year, they also fitted in over 140 visits by request to individual University institutions and 100 to Colleges, assisted institutions with staff selection on 25 occasions and helped with the induction of more than a dozen new staff into the idiosyncrasies of Cambridge and the local computing scene.
Report of the Information Technology Syndicate
on the University Computing Service for 2000-2001
Introduction
Syndicate Matters
Separation from the Computer Laboratory
The Computing Service
EastNet and SuperJANET 4
Network Security
Managed Cluster Service
Videoconferencing Service
Data Protection Act 1998
IP Addresses
Network
Granta Backbone Network
Cambridge University Data Network Connections
Network Support
Transatlantic Traffic
Network-related services
Electronic Mail
Information Services
Centrally-managed services
Public Workstation Facility
Central Unix Service
User Administration
Pelican data archive service
High Performance Computing Facility
Support services
Software Sales
Managed Cluster Service
External Hardware Maintenance
Printing and Reproduction Service
Photography & Illustration Service
Videoconferencing Service
Advice and consultancy
Technical User Services
Consultancy, Help Desk and Techlink
Training
Unix Support
Support for Purchases of Personal Systems
Directorate and liaison
Institution Liaison
Statistical Annexe
Introduction
1. The Information Technology Syndicate develops computing policy for the University and the Colleges and supervises the University Computing Service; this report covers the activities of the Syndicate and the Service for the year from August 2000 to July 2001. The printed version of the Statistical Annex gives only top level summaries of the use of services but breakdowns to the level of individual institutions are available on the World Wide Web at http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/itsyndicate/annrep/stats00.01.html. Please note that the statistical information is provided only to give a general picture of the width and volume of Service activities and makes no pretensions to being fully comprehensive.
Syndicate Matters
2. The IT Syndicate again functioned smoothly and effectively under the chairmanship of Professor Longair, while its Technical Committee, chaired by Dr Heath and now including a representative from the Management Information Services Division of the University Offices, continued to provide extremely valuable input to the discussion of any business with a technical dimension. Issues discussed by the Syndicate and dealt with in more detail below include the EastNet regional network, the future development of the CUDN, reducing the impact of hackers by blocking certain types of traffic, a Code of Practice for Computing Service staff dealing with personal information and plans to avoid running out of IP addresses.
3. Computer staff employment issues continued to be a major concern. At the February Syndicate meeting, the Director of Personnel, who was present with two of his senior staff, outlined the progress made since the previous summer (including agreement in principle to drop the strict age relationship for starting salaries) and future possibilities (including plans to establish a transparent reward structure based on well thought out criteria). Dr Sayers was subsequently asked to contribute to a general review of academic-related staff recruitment and retention by producing proposals for changes to Computer Officer contracts and salary scales, and most of the June meeting was given over to a detailed discussion of his draft paper, which was then modified accordingly and sent off to the Personnel Committee.
Separation from the Computer Laboratory
4. By the end of the year, the academic side of the Computer Laboratory was ready to move both itself and that name to West Cambridge, while the Computing Service remained on the New Museums Site. This physical separation of the Laboratory and the Service was preceded by the approval of a Report which formally established the Computing Service as an independent institution under the supervision of the General Board with effect from 1 January 2001, including appropriate changes to various regulations and the establishment of two new Appointments Committees for the officers in the Service.
5. During the Lent and Easter terms, the General Board re-allocated the New Museums Site accommodation being vacated by the Computer Laboratory. The Computing Service share is less than was requested (particularly in the Arup Building, where the space is to be shared with the Language Centre) but will meet all short term needs. By the end of the year, in addition to the new (and mostly HEFCE Teaching Infrastructure funded) undergraduate classrooms on Arup Floor 2, EMBS were preparing to refurbish the Hardware Support workshop and the Service's newly acquired parts of the Austin Building, including the relocation of the Common Room from Arup Floor 2. Thought was also being given to the security and access implications of needing to make the new classrooms (and adjacent Language Centre facilities) available to students around the clock. room.
The Computing Service
6. The facilities and services provided by the Computing Service include:
Services such as networks and electronic mail, which can only be provided on a University-wide basis;
Centrally-managed services such as the Public Workstation Facility (PWF) and the Central Unix Service (CUS), which are available to any member of the University who needs them but provide facilities of a kind which individual institutions often supply in-house to their own staff and students;
A wide range of support services for institutional and individually-owned facilities, from local area networks and personal computers to powerful multi-user computers and scientific workstations;
Advice and consultancy services which include a Help Desk for the centrally-managed facilities, the Techlink support scheme for local computer staff and a wide range of training courses.
7. The Computing Service is made up of five divisions; two of these manage central facilities and provide specialised technical support of various kinds while the other three which provide direct support to users, either individually or by institution.
The Network division is responsible for the University Data Network (CUDN), the Granta Backbone Network (GBN), support for institutional networking, the PWF and the Managed Cluster Service;
The Systems and Unix division is responsible for the CUS, the Thor teaching facility, electronic mail and news services, Unix support to individual institutions and the Pelican archive service;
The Technical User Support division is responsible for the Help Desk and the Techlink scheme for local computer support staff, training courses, general technical user support and the Hardware Maintenance and Videoconferencing services.
The User Services division is responsible for information provision, user administration, Software Sales, hardware purchasing advice and the Printing and Photography & Illustration services;
The Institution Liaison division maintains contact concerning institutional IT strategies and related matters with Heads of Department, other senior managers and local computer support staff.
8. The following table summarises the estimated cost of various types of service provided by the Computing Service, distinguishing central funding (UEF and equipment grant) from costs met by charging users (with combined 2000 figures in italics). The cost recovery services account for £1.57M (29% of the total) compared with £1.58M in 2000 and £1.32M in 1999.
2001 (£K)
Centrally Funded Cost Rec'y Combined Total
Service Staff Other Total % 2001 2000
Network 508 120 628 16.5% 410 1,038 920
Network-related 386 150 536 14.1% 31 567 497
PWF 300 142 442 11.6% 442 394
CUS & Thor 144 30 174 4.6% 235 252
Other centrally-run facilities 228 10 238 6.3% 28 266 248
Software sales 103 0 103 2.7% 631 734 836
Other charged support services 290 0 290 7.6% 474 765 722
Advice & consultancy 639 49 687 18.1% 687 666
Directorate & liaison 253 113 367 9.6% 367 398
Administration & overheads 182 154 336 8.8% 336 327
TOTAL 3,033 768 3,801 100.0% 1,574 5,375 5,243
Some of the major developments during the year are discussed immediately below, followed by paragraphs about each of the individual services.
EastNet and SuperJANET 4
9. The EastNet regional network, which resulted from a successful bid for funding under the second phase of the HEFCE Metropolitan Area Network Initiative, links together seven universities (Cambridge, Anglia Polytechnic, Cranfield, East Anglia, Essex, Hertfordshire and Luton) plus Homerton and Writtle College (Chelmsford). EastNet has its primary JANET connection at Cambridge (in the Computing Service) and Cambridge was also the lead site in its implementation, although ownership may be transferred to the Association of Universities in the Eastern Region. Following a procurement process during Summer 2000, ntl were awarded a contract to provide the EastNet network services, while a separate procurement for network interface equipment resulted in the use of Cisco routers supplied by Logical UK.
10. Although thrashing out the details of the contract with ntl cost the head of the Network Division much time and effort, their implementation work was completed in early April (only slightly behind schedule) and, after the installation of the routers, EastNet came into service during May. An invitation from HEFCE to bid against a £860K allocation for enhancing EastNET was used both to uprate the routers and to improve the reliability of the power supply for the equipment at Cambridge by installing an Uninterruptible Power Supply backed up by a diesel generator. A contract was negotiated with UKERNA to manage EastNet; the associated costs will be covered by counter payments in respect of UKERNA's use of EastNet to meet its contractual requirements to provide JANET connections to HEIs and FEIs in the region.
11. By the end of January, Worldcom had completed the Cambridge SuperJANET 4 node, installing new fibre cables from the Science Park to the Computing Service, where they were connected to the UKERNA Backbone Access Router. The SuperJANET 4 connection provides a total capacity of 2.5 Gbps for all the institutions in East Anglia; at 1 Gbps for both incoming and outgoing traffic the Cambridge share of this is almost two orders of magnitude more than the previous (outgoing only) limit of 12 Mbps under SuperJANET 3.
CUDN Development and Reliability Issues
12. In mid-August 2000, CUDN performance was badly degraded for several days by an intermittent fault which caused major loss of connectivity and was made more difficult to investigate by the attempts of the network's automatic reconfiguration software to respond to the constantly changing situation. The fault caused great inconvenience to Finance Division staff trying to process payroll and other vital functions using procedures which depended critically on good data communications between offices at the Old Schools and computers at the old Royal Greenwich Observatory building (although it was not responsible for most of the long delays then being encountered by other users of the newly live CAPSA project). It was the first significant CUDN failure since February 1999 and during the interim both JANET failures and planned electrical shutdowns had caused far more total loss of connectivity.
13. Following the fault, steps were taken to improve reliability of the links between the Old Schools and the RGO. A more general conclusion, reinforced by similar but much shorter failures in the Michaelmas Term, was that the intermittent faults were related to overloading on the central ATM switch. Existing plans to simplify the design of the CUDN by ceasing all use of the ATM protocol and to convert the backbone network to use Gigabit (1000 Mbps) ethernet were therefore accelerated and by July the backbone network was using IP only, with Gigabit ethernet in use on all main trunk links to the routing nodes and also on most backup ones.
14. However CUDN development never stands still and in May the University submitted a successful £1.2 M bid for its further enhancement using money from the Science Research Investment Fund (with a 25% contribution from the University). To enable the network infrastructure to support the next generation of e-science projects, the central switches and routers will be replaced by higher performance equipment which can use the full capacity of the SuperJANET 4 link and deliver Gigabit speed connections to departments. Using high-performance Cisco routers with built-in redundancy should also improve network reliability.
Network Security
15. Protecting the CUDN from hackers is a never-ending battle over constantly shifting ground. During the year, attacks became noticeably more automated, and a successful probe would immediately use its target system to attack other machines on the CUDN (or in one case to launch "denial of service" attacks against external targets, effectively paralysing the Cambridge connection to JANET). Investigating and recovering from these incidents can be very prodigal of staff time. For example, when a single insecure machine was compromised in December and used to probe the entire network for a service normally blocked at the JANET-CUDN network, the result was five more compromises, all in different institutions. Users at each institution had to reset their passwords and the overall cost of the incident was at least 30 person-days of Computing Service staff time, plus that of the local computer support staff.
16. Incoming traffic was already being blocked at the JANET-CUDN gateway (with a few exceptions for host destinations with valid needs) on several ports not much used by ordinary users but popular with hackers. However, between October and December, so many probes were observed on the ftp (file transfer protocol) port that, despite the fact that it would affect many users, it was decided to block from January 22 all incoming requests for ftp transfers in either direction. The blocking was widely advertised to users during the Christmas vacation, staff were primed to provide advice on alternative procedures and a few exceptions were made for user systems with a large need and a good security record. In the event, users adapted to the ftp blocking much more readily than was first feared and its introduction caused very much less overall disruption than if the probing had been allowed to continue unchecked.
17. For the rest of the year, external probing continued at alarming rates but the blocking kept it at bay apart from a few small and well-contained security breaches. From May, Web servers running Microsoft IIS were attacked by the Code Red worm, which became more of a threat with each month's new variant. For much of late June and July, major denial of service attacks sent vast amounts of unwanted transatlantic traffic to certain Computing Service and other cam.ac.uk addresses. Attacks on this scale caused noticeable SuperJANET degradation and after consultation between the local and JANET Computer Emergency Response Teams countermeasures were installed at the US end of the transatlantic links to limit their effect.
Data Protection Act 1998
18. Previous reports have described Computing Service plans to comply with this Act by the time the transitional exemption for existing computing activities expires in October 2001. In December, the Service produced a Code of Practice for its staff which sets out procedures for dealing with various kinds of request involving personal data. The Code takes into account not only the Data Protection Act 1998 but also other relevant recent legislation including the Human Rights Act, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Telecommunications Regulations 2000. After approval by the IT Syndicate, the Code of Practice was made available on the web for the benefit of University institutions and Colleges facing similar problems.
IP Addresses
19. If no changes are made to the way in which Cambridge IP (v4, 32-bit) addresses are currently allocated, they may well run out in two years or so (i.e. well before IP v6 with 64-bit addresses comes into widespread use). Following the Technical Committee's consideration of how to use the existing total Cambridge allocation more effectively (IP v4 addresses being currently in such short supply world-wide that asking for more is unlikely to succeed), the Computing Service has agreed to produce an action plan. Possible strategies include using Network Address Translation for new student users, freeing up sparsely allocated address ranges and creating a strategic reserve from addresses currently allocated to the Computer Laboratory. The practicability of connecting College rooms via an ISP rather than the CUDN while maintaining student access to appropriate cam.ac.uk facilities will also be investigated.
Network
Granta Backbone Network
20. Network division staff again handled all operational matters for the GBN Management Committee. During the year, as part of EastNet, Homerton finally obtained its long planned GBN connection. At West Cambridge, the re-routing of GBN cables to allow the access road to be widened was completed, also the GBN node in the new Computer Laboratory building. Following the completion of the Unilever Centre, cables were installed on the new GBN route into Chemistry and the re-instatement of diverted services was put in hand. Building work at New Hall necessitated a move of the GBN cabinet and cables to the opposite end of the College, although staff managed to limit downtime on the CUDN connection to a few minutes. Finally, discussions which are in progress about the re-routing of GBN ducts and cables because of separate building projects at the Sidgwick Site and at Gonville & Caius Harvey Court aim to limit overall disruption by agreeing in advance one new route across both sites.
Cambridge University Data Network Connections
21. Almost all of the network now consists of ethernet connections, either at 10 Mbps or less (slow) or at 100 Mbps or more (fast); these institutional links are connected via eight area routers to the Gigabit ethernet CUDN backbone network (see above). Uninterruptible Power Supplies were installed at two of the area routers (North and West) and when their performance has been assessed, more may follow. During the year, the number of fast connections increased from 48 to 76 while that of slow ones fell from 94 to 73 (for fuller details see the Annex). In general, each of these connections will support one or more local area networks (LANs), thereby interconnecting equipment in a whole building or even a whole department.
22. Around Easter, the first Gigabit ethernet connections to individual institutions were installed and both new connections and upgrades to this speed now appear as standard items on the CUDN price list. Virtual Private Network tunnelling products were trialled, with the aim of allowing the same secure authenticated access to CUDN services via other Internet Service Providers, as if the client were within cam.ac.uk. Total registrations for the Magpie modem service were again just over 2,000 and the existing lines and modems handled the load without congestion; most subscribers now use V.90 modems at 56 Kbps, and so notice was given that the older and slower V.34 and SLIP service will be withdrawn from April 2002.
23 While the ethernet connections data shows how the CUDN now reaches into every corner of the University and Colleges, the true size of the network is most obvious from the total of Internet addresses. This was 42,900 at the end of 2000-01 (up from 36,500, 29,500 and 18,900 in previous years), with 28,000 addresses in University institutions and 14,900 in the Colleges. The University ones were used not only for personal computers and workstations but also for many servers and other equipment while the College addresses included over 7,500 active connections in student study bedrooms. The July introduction of devolved IP address registration will allow College computer staff to deal with the Michaelmas 2001 rush without the previous need to involve Computing Service staff.
Network Support
24. During the year, Network Support staff provided advice to individual institutions on over 210 occasions (40 more than in 1999-2000); typical topics included wiring up buildings, establishing LANs and obtaining CUDN connections. The Network Installation team was just as busy as in previous years and carried out or supervised work which included 30 new fast ethernet installations or upgrades, new network equipment installations at 11 sites, optical fibre installation work at 25, copper wiring at over 30 and testing of existing cables at 5.
Transatlantic Traffic
25. Individual institutions were again charged a share of the cost of incoming transatlantic SuperJANET traffic. Total traffic was 60% more than in 1999-2000, but the overall charge to Cambridge had been fixed in advance at £113,651 (down from £132,580) and so the top charge to any individual institution (all of the top six and eight of the top ten being Colleges) was again only £6,300. The same charging mechanism will apply in 2001-02, with Cambridge as a whole paying £119,968, but major changes are expected from the following year. The Computing Service continued to supply Colleges on request with snapshot monitoring information to identify individual cases of large use, but remained unable (for reasons outlined in last year's report) to produce reliable figures for the total traffic to individual IP addresses.
26. Since in the previous year saturation of the outgoing 8 Mbps link to JANET had caused considerable concern, an increase to 12 Mbps from the start of the Michaelmas Term was purchased from UKERNA. This, combined with the use of control mechanisms to limit the impact of outgoing recreational traffic at busy times, avoided any serious problems until the greatly increased bandwidth provided by SuperJANET 4 and EastNet came on stream (see above). The control mechanisms were then removed, but the immediate effect was that increased recreational use caused outgoing traffic volumes to match or slightly exceed incoming ones, so some of the controls were reinstated.
Network-related services
Electronic Mail
27. As a result of the advance integration of additional equipment, the Hermes mailstore system coped well with the usual sharp rise in demand at the start of Michaelmas 2000. The total volume of mail delivered by Hermes increased by 60% during the year (from 320 GB to 520 GB) after more than doubling in the previous one, while the number of messages increased by 15% (from 49.1 M to 56.6 M) after a 50% rise in the previous year. The number of users of Hermes rose by 1,800, from 26,100 to 27,900, although some of these were existing email users transferring over from CUS. For much of the year, staff illness and other problems limited software work to routine maintenance and local improvements to deal with increases in load but towards the end work was resumed on essential long term software developments. The first to appear is the Web interface to Hermes which, after needing to be coded specially to achieve the required scale of operation, should go into pilot service during Michaelmas 2001.
Information Services
28. For Michaelmas 2000, the data management facilities on the Computing Service web servers were improved and the pages about the Service were re-designed to direct users more effectively to the relevant electronic and paper documentation; this significantly increased the number of accesses. New material installed on the University server included the Press Office's Media Guide to Expertise (using material collected via an on-line database) and the 2002 Undergraduate Prospectus, including departmental contact information. By the end of the year Information Group staff had also completed the task of lower-casing all the urls on the server, to simplify access for both users and maintainers. The Technical Librarians dealt with 5,644 enquiries to Webmaster (32% up on the 4,267 in 1999-2000), in addition to maintaining the staff library and setting up user libraries for new Managed Cluster Service installations.
29. The server hosted pages for over 180 University societies (150 in 1999-2000), while 42 (25) bodies used the managed Web server service for institutions which can author pages but do not wish to run their own server. A pilot Web-based version of the University map was released to general approval after Systems and Unix staff had solved the technical problems of presenting a complex map on relatively low-resolution web browser screens while including features such as zoom and locate. The Information Group incorporated the map data (derived from the same base as by the University Press's paper version) and will be liaising with the Press about future updates. Staff also continued to provide input to the University Web Site Steering Committee, and to organise useful and well attended meetings of local Webmasters.
30 The Computing Service University-wide web search engine uses commercial Ultraseek software to produce a single index of the contents of all the more-or-less "official" servers within cam.ac.uk. This allows outside requests to locate material without the need to know or guess in advance which server may have it, also to make complex searches and to search within individual servers. The following table compares use in July in 2001 and July 2000:
July 2001 July 2000
Servers, documents indexed 321, 401 K 269, 267 K
Total searches, data sent, 111 K, 2.2 GB 90 K, 1.8 GB
% requests from Cambridge, rest of UK, rest of world 25%, 15%, 60% 22%, 15%, 63%
Originating computers: University, rest of world 4.5 K, 25.5 K 4.4 K, 21.1 K
31 During the year, there were 66.5 M incoming requests (compared with 49.1 M in 1999-2000) to the main Computing Service Web site (http://www.cam.ac.uk/). They came from over 190 country-level domains (180), with a daily peak of 304 K (216 K). The past expenditure of time and money on monitoring and fallback arrangements paid good dividends over the Christmas break when staff were alerted to and readily circumvented hardware failures which would otherwise have caused a major outage of information services. The following table compares main server activity during July 2001 with July 2000:
July 2001 July 2000
Total requests received, total data sent 5.7 M, 29 GB 3.7 M, 17 GB
% requests from Cambridge, rest of UK, rest of world 33%, 8%, 59% 42%, 10%, 48%
Originating computers: University, rest of world 12.3 K, 150.6 K 10.7 K, 118.0 K
32. The local and national Web caches reduce external network use and improve performance by automatically maintaining copies of recently referenced documents. During Michaelmas 2000 there was serious overload on the local cache server, and although some improvement was obtained from changes to the server software, new hardware with additional capacity was clearly needed. The new system uses a cluster of powerful PCs, which not only facilitates the provision of spare components and fallback capacity but also makes the system easier to build and to develop. After a phased introduction starting in late April, the system is already handling a greater load than its predecessor with much improved performance. The table summarises activity for the new cache in July 2001 and for the old in July 2000. Because one cannot distinguish individual clients in institutions which route requests to the cache via firewalls or local web caches, the client systems figures will be underestimates.
July 2001 July 2000
Total requests received, total data volume 122 M, 830 GB 61.8 M, 465 GB
% hits (requests), % hits (data volume) 46.4%, 18.0% 48.3%, 19.3%
Client systems, client domains 8,559,161, 161 6,652, 150
33. The Computing Service's USENET news server gives Cambridge users access to thousands of local and world-wide news groups, thereby providing them with the opportunity to disseminate information on, and to engage in the discussion of, a very wide range of topics. The following table compares the levels of activity during July 2001 and July 2000:
July 2001 July 2000
News server connections: monthly total, peak rate 282 K, 102 232 K, 164
Total, local newsgroups 14.4 K, 233 13.7 K, 229
Monthly volume, number of individual postings 18.5 GB, 8.9 M 19.1 GB, 9.2 M
Centrally-managed services
Public Workstation Facility
34 The Public Workstation Facility and the Managed Cluster Service (see below) are supported by the staff of the Small Systems Group and the Operations Group, who planned and implemented two major changes during the year. First, during the Easter vacation, six of the central PWF servers were replaced by new and more powerful hardware and four were upgraded to use Novell NetWare 5.1 with the newer version of Directory Services. This worked well in general, but an unfortunate side effect caused the loss of statistical data on PWF use from 18 April until the end of July. The following table therefore compares data for the first 8.5 months of 2000-01 with (in italics) full year figures for 1999-2000. (N.B. In general, undergraduates are registered as College users and postgraduates as University ones.)
Public Workstation Facility
Users Sessions
University 4,329 (46.1%) 4,530 (51.1%) 237,489 (37.4%) 409,275 (50.0%)
Colleges 5,016 (53.4%) 4,300 (48.5%) 395,955 (62.3%) 405,681 (49.5%)
External 40 (0.4%) 27 (0.3%) 2,179 (0.3%) 4,401 (0.5%)
TOTAL 9,385 (100.0%) 8,857 (100.0%) 635,623 (100.0%) 819,537 (100.0%)
35. During the year, staff continued to roll out a new basic Windows NT image each quarter, managing the provision of multiple variants to different sites by using Zenworks Workstation objects. All PWF Macintoshes were given a new log-in program and upgraded to OS 9.1. When escaping Microsoft NETBIOS traffic caused broadcast storm problems on the CUDN, the PWF Club members installed Netware 4 tunnel blocks to contain it within each institution. Finally, after much planning and testing, the second major change took place just after the end of the year, when a one-day shutdown allowed all PWF and MCS sites to change simultaneously to a new image which uses Windows 2000 Pro rather than Windows NT.
Central Unix Service. Thor and Linux
36. The Central Unix Service continued to be widely used by researchers throughout the University, although a significant number of mail-only users moved to Hermes. The related Thor facility supports Unix-based taught courses (primarily in Physics and Computer Science, although a Geography course was included at very short notice). The table below presents summary statistical information for their use in 2000-01, with that for 1999-2000 in italics:
Central Unix Service Thor
CPU Users CPU Users
University 92.3% 90.5% 3,135 3,715 8.6% 15.7% 66 112
Colleges 6.9% 8.8% 378 428 91.4% 84.3% 402 351
External 0.8% 0.7% 38 49
TOTAL 100.0% 100.0% 3,551 4,192 100.0% 100.0% 468 463
37. Following the success of last year's pilot project to provide Linux on the Computer Science PWF cluster, Unix Support staff put in over eight man-months of work (at all levels from operating system modifications to applications tuning) to create PWF Linux. This will run alongside Windows and MacOS on dual-boot machines in PWF clusters (and MCS clusters which opt to include it) and can also be used on a dedicated machine to provide students with remote access (using SSH) during vacations to Unix-based PWF teaching material.
User Administration
38 During summer 2000, substantial developments were carried out to the user database. As part of the pre-registration of 7,000 new postgraduates and undergraduates for the start of Michaelmas 2000, a new Web-based facility was introduced to allow those who could establish their identity by supplying appropriate personal information remotely to be sent details of their email address in advance. Although only limited password resets were required this year, surprisingly many users were out of the country and had to prove their identity over the telephone to get their new password; arrangements have therefore been made to allow such people to nominate in advance someone with authority to act on their behalf if necessary.
39. Thanks to increased network security activity (see above), the total number of incidents requiring investigation was 733 (45% up on the 506 in 1999-2000). Many of the non-security incidents involved unwanted email (which often appeared to come from a Cambridge user but had actually been forged by an external user); another common type, especially in Michaelmas, was internal probing caused by inexperienced students with incorrectly configured machines.
Pelican data archive service
40. The new disc farm based Pelican data archive service continued to operate efficiently, with considerably faster retrieval times than the tape based system it had replaced. By the end of the year, the total data stored was 200 GB (20% up on last year's 166 GB) for 920 different users (949) and it was clear that more discs should be added very soon. Although Pelican was used to some extent by more than 80 University and College institutions, the largest users by volume continued to be the Computing Service (for backup of programs and data) and the University Library (for various projects including the storage of scanned photographic data).
High Performance Computing Facility
41. The Computing Service continued to provide the High Performance Computing Facility (which comes under a separate committee of management) with the services of one of its senior programmers who has a particular interest in advanced computing systems.
Support services
Software Sales
42. Software Sales supplies members of the University with competitively priced software through CHEST (Combined HE Software Team) and other deals and administers University-wide support agreements for Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations. After much consideration of how best to reconcile user demands for faster ordering and delivery with the need to stay within the terms of the different licences and to ensure that users are aware of the University Software Policy, the Web software product catalogue was supplemented by a Web Ordering System. This allows users who have already signed up to the general terms and conditions to create and print order applications on-line, although the need to accompany them with a purchase order (currently only available on paper) then slows things down to the speed of the internal mail. The table below summarises sales for 2000-01, with 1999-2000 in italics.
Software Sales Items
Communications 751 598
Graphics & drawing, statistics 2,226 2,626
Office packages, operating systems/utilities 6,510 7,702
Programming languages, mathematics/libraries 675 689
Word processing, spreadsheets, databases 1,826 2,307
Geographic, miscellaneous 1,742 1,169
SunSpectrum/Silicon Graphics 486 556
TOTAL 14,216 15.656
Managed Cluster Service
43. The Managed Cluster Service (MCS) enables institutions to reduce the running costs of their general-access computer rooms by paying the Computing Service to install and manage both the Novell NetWare servers and software for the PCs and Macintoshes, based on the standard PWF image (see above) with optional additional applications. The 17 MCS clusters at the start of the year (ten in departments and seven in Colleges), had increased by three (at Chemistry (Unilever Building), Selwyn and Sidney Sussex) by January 2001 and by five more (at the new Computer Laboratory, the Betty and Gordon Moore Library, Clare, Emmanuel and Trinity Hall) by September 2001. To reduce the total number of servers and hence the work involved in installing new images, these five and all future clusters will use (and share where appropriate) servers which are supplied by and located in the Computing Service.
External Hardware Maintenance
44 The Engineering Group again provided institutions and individuals with either a full cover contract service or repairs charged on a time and materials basis and also carried our warranty repairs on behalf of certain manufacturers for their University customers. The tables summarise repair work carried out during 2000-01, with figures for 1999-2000 in italics.
Equipment repaired by Type
Contract Non-contract
IBM PC &c. 147 125 138 152
Apple Macintosh 46 55 89 157
Printers 97 73 137 126
Laptops 5 9 192 259
Other equipment 95 117 113 136
TOTAL 390 379 669 380
Equipment repaired by Institution
Contract Non-contract
University 208 258 473 571
Colleges 182 121 190 251
External 6 8
TOTAL 390 379 669 830
Printing and Reproduction Service
45 The existing Xerox Docutech and Xerox and Agfa colour machines continued to work well. During the year, the Docutech service produced a total of 0.91 M impressions for the Computing Service (up from 0.75 M in 1999-2000), 0.81 M for the Computer Laboratory (0.72 M) and 0.60 M for external customers (0.52 M), while the colour copy totals were: Service 7 K (12K); Laboratory 1.4 K (1K); external customers 7.2 K (13.5 K). The lease on the Xerox equipment expires in December 2001 and plans are in hand to obtain replacements more suited to the reduced requirement following the departure of the Computer Laboratory.
Photography & Illustration Service
46 Although the traditional photographic activities had a rather reduced throughput of 7,300 rolls of E6 film (compared to 8,800 in 1999-2000), 133,000 colour prints (160,000), 3,300 duplicate slides (5,000) and 3,400 slides made up from artwork supplied by customers (3,700), the number of posters produced doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 and a new service to scan 35mm film into digital images on CD processed almost 300 rolls. Staff took photographs for sale at General Admission and other Congregations, both inside the Senate House and on the Lawn, and also carried specialist photographic work for departments and colleges on request. Equipment purchases included a 60" wide inkjet printer to keep pace with user requirements for larger posters, a more modern display board system for hiring out, and new digital minilab film processing equipment which will be in service by Michaelmas 2001.
Videoconferencing Service
47 The staff of this service spent much time during the year using their considerable expertise in both ISDN and IP (room and PC-based) videoconferencing to advise those University departments (such as Education, Engineering, Mathematics and the Veterinary School) which wanted to move on from extensive use of our facilities to buying their own equipment. As a result, despite an increasing overall interest in videoconferencing throughout the University, total use of the Computing Service suite for ISDN videoconferencing was only 132 hours in 72 bookings (compared with 170 hours in 87 bookings in 1999-2000.) To keep abreast of new developments, staff purchased IP desktop cameras for trial purposes and spent two weeks in July, in association with the Cambridge-MIT Project (CMI)), on successful trials of an IP/ISDN codec from Tandberg. CMI subsequently purchased four of these codecs, for the Computing Service facility and for new videoconferencing facilities in CMI, the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technology (CARET) and the Judge Management Institute, while the Service team will manage the installation, training and support for all four.
Advice and consultancy
Technical User Services
48. The Technical User Support division (TUS) manages and largely staffs the advice and consultancy services, including the Help Desk and Techlink (see below) and also looks after a wide range of application software on the PWF and other Computing Service facilities. At the request of the Windows Integration Group, a bookable Test Bed Facility of PC server and workstation equipment was set up to double both as a facility for learning about NT under the guidance of TUS staff and an environment in which local computer support staff may safely rehearse planned changes to their institutional systems. Although there were no major virus problems until the summer worms, staff continued to distribute McAffee VirusScan and other anti-virus software and to remind users of the need to install it and keep it up to date.
49. At the start of the year, the joint Computing Service/Library Electronic Reference Library system held 10 databases, although PsycLit was soon replaced by the larger and more frequently updated PsycInfo. Additions during the year were MLA International Bibliography (covering language, literature, linguistics and folklore) and British Nursing Index, Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature and Health Management Information Consortium (covering between them nursing, midwifery, biomedicine and health care and management). Medline was again by far the most widely and heavily used of the individual databases.
Consultancy, Help Desk and Techlink
50 TUS staff give general user consultations on a wide range of topics and provide a member of the support team which co-ordinates computing developments and technical liaison with the Computing Service for the whole of the Sidgwick site, where staff from the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre (LLCC) also provide a specialist service for the humanities. Because of changes in recording practice, it is no longer possible to give detailed figures for staff time spent on all kinds of advice and consultancy work but the following table summarises Help Desk calls for 2000-01, with 1999-2000 figures in italics:
Help Desk Calls
University 7,103 (70.6%) 7.142 (71,2%)
Colleges 2,420 (24.1%) 2,565 (25.6%)
External 535 (5.3%) 319 (3.2%)
TOTAL 10,058 (100.0%) 10,026 (100.0%)
More calls were initiated by telephone (45%) than in person (28%) or by email (also 28%). Over 85% of calls were closed within 1 hour and over 90% with 24 hours while 2% of calls had to be referred to local computer staff when Help Desk staff could not provide a ready answer to a question about a non-Computing Service facility.
51. In return for asking users to direct queries about non-Computing Service facilities to local computer support staff, the Service provides those staff with "fast track" backup and general support through the Techlink scheme, which had over 300 members by the end of the year (up from 260 a year earlier). Techlinks initiated 14.4% (13.4% in 1999-2000) of all Help Desk calls but, because their questions tend to be more difficult, again accounted for 21.8% of the total time spent answering calls. For Michaelmas 2000, the Service's various IT support mailing lists were rationalised into just two (departmental and College), which are now widely used not only by the Service but also by support staff seeking (and usually finding) all kinds of advice and information from their peers. The Techlink seminars given by Service staff were regularly updated to reflect current concerns and proved so popular that both the room and the day had to be changed to accommodate everyone who wanted to come to them.
Training
52. The Computing Service training courses on central services and popular applications software help reduce the advice and consultancy load and enable better use to be made of computer equipment throughout the University. Some Michaelmas Term courses were again heavily oversubscribed and additional sessions had to be arranged, although demand for the most basic courses fell off. It was clear nevertheless that some new students need IT literacy training, although additional publicity channels may be needed to reach them all. Demand for courses was high again in the Easter Term as students took their last chance to benefit from free training; the additional sessions included a 2-afternoon Introduction to Unix given at New Addenbrooke's. Exit surveys continued to report customer satisfaction rates of 90% or 95%. The table summarises course information for 2000-01, with 1999-2000 in italics.
Course Types
Sessions Attendances
Personal Computers 13 17 194 291
Unix 13 14 970 858
Networking 46 58 1,183 1,363
Spreadsheets & Databases 35 34 1,091 1,064
Word & Doc. Processing 42 41 931 826
Statistical Computing 9 7 438 282
Other courses 5 4 356 252
TOTAL 163 175 5,163 4,936
Course Attendance
Attendances
University 4,153 3,686
Colleges 878 1,087
External 132 163
TOTAL 5,163 4,936
53. After the resignation of a key member of the training team, who had inter alia given all the courses for assistant staff, it was fortunately possible to recruit a well-qualified replacement at the first attempt. Well attended and received imported courses from external providers included an SPLUS introduction and two courses for Webmasters from Netskills, while in July Dr Hazel, author of the widely used Exim email software, gave a very successful two-day workshop to 86 participants (over double the original plan), including 20 from overseas. Computing Service trainers also provided a growing number of customised courses for specific groups, ranging from an Excel course for administrative staff needing to input RAE information through Powerpoint for staff from English and Windows 2000 for Jesus College to Access, SPSS and Excel courses for delegates attending a conference at Anaesthesia.
54. Total loans and sales from the self-teaching courseware library went up by 25% and a total of 212 assistant staff from University institutions attended 31 Personnel Division funded course sessions (compared to 176 and 23 in 1999-2000), although the attendance at similar courses for College staff was only 50 at 6 sessions (compared to 167 at 18).
Unix Support
55. Major projects carried out during the year included the development of PWF Linux (see above) and the completion of the JTAP funded work to develop the friendly probing software (as described in last year's report). After much development and testing of this largely unsung but complex and critical infrastructure component, the introduction of a new print spooler was achieved with only minor glitches. The week-long hands-on course on Linux System Administration was given twice and the ssh CD, which allows Unix users to log on securely from remote locations, was updated. Direct institutional support, including help to recover from security incidents, was provided to Chemistry, Lucy Cavendish, Management Information Services, Biochemistry and 20 other departments or Colleges.
Support for Purchases of Personal Systems
56. Using information and feedback obtained from regular contacts with major suppliers, Computing Service staff again advised individual users and institutions, either in person or via Web pages, about economic sources of personal computer systems to meet their particular needs. The Service Web pages were linked to the new site maintained by the University Purchasing Office, with which a close liaison has developed. The fifth annual November Demonstration Day again attracted hundreds of University users into the Small Examination Hall, where a wide range of hardware and software vendors were exhibiting their wares.
Directorate and liaison
Institution Liaison
57. This division liaises on computing matters at institution level with both senior management and computer support staff, and its two staff are able to call on assistance from the Directorate, Network Support and Technical User Services as required. The help given to departments facing TQA assessments included advising on the preparation of IT-related base materials, attending Learning Resources meetings and arranging for assessors to visit the central PWF classrooms. Staff also spent much time on the difficult IT resource and support issues arising out of the transfer of Homerton's teaching to the School of Education and on understanding and implementing the access control system for the Raised Faculty Building.
58. In a new development, Institution Liaison staff were asked by some institutions not only to advise on computer staff gradings and individual appointments but also to help with the appraisal of existing staff; this raised some rather more general concerns about support and personal development opportunities for computer staff which were shared with the Personnel Division. Meanwhile staff continued to organise both well attended termly meetings open to all departmental and/or College computer staff and smaller liaison meetings at which staff from the Computing Service and from the Library or Management Information Services could discuss issues of mutual interest. They also fitted in almost 150 visits by request to University institutions and 100 to Colleges, assisted with staff selection on nearly 30 occasions and helped introduce several new staff into the idiosyncrasies of computing in Cambridge.