Previous page

Table of Contents

Next page

Report of the Information Technology Syndicate on the University Computing Service for 2001-2002

Introduction

1. The remit of the Information Technology Syndicate is to develop computing policy for the University and the Colleges and to supervise the University Computing Service and this Report and Statistical Annex cover the activities of the Syndicate and the Service for the year 1 August 2001 to 31 July 2002. The printed version of the 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/stats01.02.html. Please note that the statistical information is only intended to give a general picture of the width and volume of Service activities and makes no attempt at being fully comprehensive.

Syndicate matters

2. Professor Longair continued to chair the IT Syndicate and Dr Heath its Technical Committee. Items on the Syndicate's agenda which concerned Computing Service activities and are therefore described in the appropriate place below included both on-going issues such as the EastNet regional network, network security and how to avoid running out of IP addresses, and also newer topics such as the enhancement of the CUDN using Science Research Infrastructure funding, recovering JANET traffic costs, and adapting for use in Cambridge a draft charter for system administrators which originated from UKERNA.

3. At its November meeting, the Syndicate discussed at some length the newly published reports by Professors Shattock and Finkelstein on the implementation of CAPSA. It concluded that the case for merging the Computing Service with the Management Information Services Division (MISD) was far from proven but merited further investigation, that the recruitment of a new Director of MISD should be followed by that of additional staff to develop in-house Unix and Oracle database support teams, and that more thought should be given to the future roles of the Syndicate and the Information Strategy Group in meeting the overall IT needs of the University and the Colleges, both administrative and academic.

4. On staff matters, the IT Syndicate warmly welcomed the University's adoption from June of those new and rationalized Computer Officer salary scales, including the new grade of Principal Computer Officer, which it had proposed the previous year. They noted that a proposed new contract for academic-related staff would replace the present system by open-ended appointments subject to the successful completion of a probationary period and that the EU Fixed Term Working Directive, due to come into force in July 2002, would require the Computing Service to give up using repeated fixed-term appointments for staffing its cost-recovery services. The Service and the Syndicate also gave the Personnel Division detailed feedback on successive drafts of its guidelines Use of computer facilities in the University by staff, laying particular emphasis on e-mail, the security and protection of information, and the desirability of quoting from or referring to existing material in the Syndicate's own guidelines.

Accommodation and building work

5. Starting in August 2001, the academic side of the Computer Laboratory quickly moved both itself and that name to West Cambridge, thereby clearing the way for several months of refurbishment work on those parts of the New Museums Site which were re-allocated to the Service, especially in the Austin Building. By June, over one-third of all staff were occupying newly fitted out offices, the new Common Room on Austin Floor 3 was proving particularly successful, and space had been found on Austin Floor 4 for a long-requested shower facility and a first-aid room. In parallel, the old Titan Room was converted, using HEFCE Teaching Infrastructure funds, into two separate but connected 40-seater state-of-the-art teaching classrooms, mostly for undergraduate courses, replacing those in the Old Music School.

6. Other building work included the refurbishment of the Hardware Support workshops, improvements to the Photographic and Illustration Service space in the Old Examination School and the creation of a Building Services workshop on the ground floor of the Tower Infill to replace that lost when the uninterrupted power supply to the main Computing Service computer room was installed (see below). Finally, after consultation with the University's insurers, plans were made to improve physical security on Arup Floor 3, which contains both the main computer room and the High Performance Computing Facility.

The Computing Service

7. The Computing Service provides the following types of facility and service:

Facilities 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 provide computing resources to individual members of the University;

Centrally managed services such as the Managed Cluster, managed Web server, and managed mail domain services, which are aimed at institutions rather than individuals;

A wide range of support services for institutional and individually owned facilities, including Software Sales, Unix Support, NT Support, and the Hardware Maintenance service;

Ancillary support services such as video-conferencing, printing, and photography and illustration;

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.

8. The five operating divisions of the Computing Service consist of two which manage the central facilities and provide specialized technical support, and three which provide support to individual users and institutions, either directly or via local computer support staff.

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, PWF Linux, electronic mail, Web cache, news, and Pelican archive services, and also provides Unix support to individual institutions;

The Technical User Support division is responsible for the Help Desk, the Techlink scheme for local computer support staff, training courses, general technical user support, and the Hardware Support and video-conferencing services;

The User Services division is responsible for information provision, user administration, software sales, hardware purchasing advice, and the printing and photography and 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.

		2002 (£000)
		Centrally Funded		Cost %	Cost Recovery	Combined Total
Service	Staff	Other	Total			2002	2001
Network	506	508	1,014	22.5%	409	1,423	1,038
Network-related	410	72	482	10.7%	27	509	567
PWF	350	332	682	15.2%		682	442
CUS and Thor	142	26	168	3.7%		168	174
Other centrally-run facilities	198	19	217	4.8%	29	246	266
Software sales	95	0	95	2.1%	649	744	734
Managed Cluster service	39	0	39	0.9%	139	178	195
Other charged support services	246	0	246	5.5%	361	607	570
Advice and consultancy	641	84	725	16.1%		725	687
Directorate, liaison, and staff eqpt	338	127	465	10.3%	9	474	367
Administration and overheads	179	185	364	8.1%		364	336
TOTAL	3,144	1,353	4,497	100.0%	1,623	6,120	5,375

9. The table above summarizes the estimated cost of providing each of the various facilities and services (with 2001 figures in italics), separating out costs met from central funding (UEF, equipment grant, and SRIF) and those recovered from charges to users. Much of the increase in the centrally funded total is due to larger than usual expenditure on equipment for the GBN, CUDN, and PWF. The cost recovery services total is £1.62m (26.5% of all costs), compared with £1.57m (29%) in 2001 and £1.58m (27.5%) in 2000.

10. 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

11. The EastNet regional network has its primary JANET connection in the Computing Service and serves the universities of Cambridge (including Homerton), Anglia Polytechnic, Cranfield, East Anglia, Essex, Hertfordshire, and Luton, plus Writtle College (Chelmsford). After Cambridge was the lead site for implementation, ownership was to be transferred to the Association of Universities in the Eastern Region (AUEE). VAT considerations ruled this out, but AUEE are now expected to appoint a Project Officer who will, inter alia, investigate certain new developments which are wanted by the other HEIs but are of little interest to Cambridge.

12. Apart from an incident at the end of January, when 17 hours' loss of connectivity on the main link to London was caused by lack of resilience due to faulty cable installation (later corrected at the supplier's expense), SuperJANET 4 performed considerably more reliably than its predecessor. In early June, two Dutch Internet service providers used for international traffic went into voluntary administration, although connectivity was maintained while UKERNA urgently negotiated alternative provision. Later that month, a similar scenario was re-enacted following the serious financial problems at SuperJANET 4 service provider MCI WorldCom.

JANET traffic costs

13. UKERNA again billed Cambridge as a whole a pre-set amount (based on relative use in previous years) for incoming transatlantic SuperJANET traffic. Until January, they also provided the itemization data used to recharge individual institutions for their share of the total but, following the arrival of new transatlantic links with additional bandwidth and new routers, were forced to withdraw that facility at very short notice. The bills for the second half of 2001-02 were therefore based on historic data in the form of relative traffic shares for the previous year. Although total transatlantic traffic up to the loss of itemization was just over twice that for the same period in 2000-01, the total pre-set charge was only £120,000 (£114,000 in 2000-01) and the largest annual total for an individual institution £9,700 (£6,300). Colleges again dominated the list of top ten paying institutions, with Engineering the only Department represented.

14. Discussions continued all year about the new network charging model for HEIs, which is now expected to apply from August 2003, to be formula based and to reflect institutional size rather than actual traffic. The JISC also decided that, although the old charging regime would be retained for 2002-03, the total annual bill for all HEIs should go up by 35% (from £3.15m in 2001-02 to £4.25m in 2002-03, increasing the Cambridge share from £120,000 to £162,000), with similar rises in the total to follow in each of the next four years.

15. When the IT Syndicate considered options for recharging these costs to individual institutions in the absence of UKERNA itemization data, the College members in particular stressed the importance of continuing to use charges based on actual traffic, although not necessarily just transatlantic traffic. Without this restriction, the Computing Service software first developed for traffic snapshots and identifying unreasonably large use could fairly easily be modified to provide comprehensive and reliable totals for both incoming and outgoing traffic to individual addresses, as measured at the JANET gateway router. So it was agreed to use the sum of these as the basis for calculating the quarterly charges starting from 1 August 2002.

CUDN development

16. As reported last year, the Science Research Investment Fund is providing 75% funding for £1.2m of expenditure on upgrading the CUDN infrastructure to support the next generation of e-science projects. The backbone network was enhanced during June and August 2002 by installing gigabit Cisco router equipment supplied by Logical UK in an EU procurement, and it is planned to increase the backbone speed further during 2003 by adding 10 Gbps dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) equipment. An uninterruptible power supply (UPS), with generator backup, was brought into service in December to help improve the reliability of the central network equipment (and of important network-related services such as electronic mail). The installation of smaller UPSs at other backbone router sites continued and the out-of-hours emergency access arrangements for these sites were reviewed.

Network security and other incidents

17. Maintaining network security involves an on-going struggle to defend against constantly changing points of attack. Once the hackers discover a new vulnerability, the probes flood in and security is breached on a greater or smaller scale until the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and other relevant Computing Service staff (from electronic mail, Unix Support, or NT Support) can put defences in place and start to restore the hacked systems. Attacks for that particular vulnerability then fade away from a major threat to a minor nuisance but never quite disappear. For instance, the threat from the Code Red and Nimda worms was so great in the run up to Michaelmas that temporary filters were installed at the CUDN routers to block connections to new Web servers until they had been cleared by the friendly probing software. The threat lessened, the filters were removed in November and never put back, but Nimda was still being seen on a few machines each month as late as July 2002.

18. In the first half of the year, when an SSH software vulnerability was being exploited as a way to hack Unix machines, the subsequent investigation was hampered by the fact that, under friendly probing, some secure versions of SSH showed as vulnerable while other machines had been hacked but appeared to be secure, courtesy of changes made by the hacker. Windows machines were attacked from February via a vulnerability in Microsoft-SQL, while the Klez mail attachment virus infected 200 machines in April (but, thanks to the efforts of the Mail team, only 50 in May). The total number of CERT probe reports increased rapidly in the latter half of the year to a July average of ten a day, seven days a week but, because of the quality of the defences, the number of actual security breaches continued to average only ten a month.

19. Thanks to the greatly increased number of probing attempts, the total number of incidents investigated during the year shot up to 2,096 (compared with 733 in 2000-01). These included both security incidents like those above and other misdemeanours including illicit software dumping, mail relay attempts and forged, political, pornographic, or harassing e-mail. The Computing Service became aware, either as a result of complaints from outside agencies or during the investigation of instances of unusually large network traffic, of an increasingly large number of computers in Colleges which were providing prima facie copyright material (usually film or music) to the Internet at large; each incident was referred for action to the appropriate Senior Tutor (with a copy to the College's computer support staff).

IP addresses

20. By the end of the year, the total number of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in use throughout the University was almost 47,000 (compared with 42,900 and 36,500 in the two preceding years), although any slowing in the rate of growth probably owes more to the introduction of tighter allocation policies (see below) than any significant slackening in demand. After allowing for network infrastructure requirements, the remaining addresses divide roughly as 30,500 used by individual University institutions (for servers and other equipment as well as personal computers and workstations) and 15,000 used by the Colleges (including 9,200 active student study bedroom connections, 20% more than a year earlier). The devolution of most IP address registration to local support staff went very smoothly, even during the Michaelmas 2001 rush, and much reduced the demands on Computing Service staff.

21. Last year's Report noted that, without changes to the way in which these IP v4 addresses were allocated, the Computing Service's basic allocation of just over 64K addresses was likely to run out within two years, whereas widespread use of IP v6 addresses was unlikely for three or four. During the year, the Computing Service introduced procedures for recovering blocks of unused addresses from individual institutions and for making new allocations more parsimoniously while Jesus College pioneered the use of private IP addresses and Network Address Translation for students and others with large numbers of devices which do not need the full range of IP protocols. For historical reasons, the Computer Laboratory and Engineering each have their own 64K IP address space and, although for technical reasons it would be very difficult to reallocate any of the Engineering addresses for general use, the Computer Laboratory agreed, subject to certain provisos, to make available for general use 32K of its addresses. With careful management, we should now be able to (just) get by.

System Administrators Charter

22. As part of their daily work, system and network administrators often need to take actions which may result in the disclosure of information held in other users' files or sent by them over communications networks; this falls within the scope of recent legislation such as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and Telecommunications Regulations 2000, the Data Protection Act 1998, and the Human Rights Act 1998. When the Head of UKERNA's CERT team produced a draft charter covering these matters, the IT Syndicate recognized its value in clarifying the rights and responsibilities of the system administrators both for themselves and for their senior management and asked the Computing Service to tailor it to the Cambridge context. The resulting paper was widely circulated both to Departments and Colleges, and also commended to the General Board and Council for official adoption on behalf of the University.

Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001

23. One aspect of this Act, which came into force on 1 September 2002, is to place a duty on the University to ensure that disabled students wishing to access Web-based information, e-learning, or other online resources are not unjustifiably treated less favourably than other people. The Computing Service, having already taken some steps in this direction on a voluntary basis, now modified its own information resources to meet the new requirements and kept local computer support staff informed about the need to comply, both by putting the relevant information on its own Web pages and by holding a Techlink seminar on the subject.

Network

Granta Backbone Network

24. As usual, the GBN Management Committee delegated the handling of all operational matters to Network division staff. Additional cables were installed on five routes in the City centre (to provide more single and multimode fibres) and also at West Cambridge, linking the Gates Building, Turbomachinery, Astronomy, and a new GBN mininode at the Temporary Catering Facility. At the Sidgwick Site, a new route from Economics to Harvey Court was agreed, ducts and cables were installed on it, existing services were moved over and the old cables removed, all ready for a July 2002 start to construction of the new English building. Plans were also made for a new route through Harvey Court and to re-route the GBN connection to New Addenbrooke's on account of the proposed new Cancer Research Centre.

Cambridge University Data Network

25. The network now consists almost entirely of ethernet connections, at 10 Mbps or less (slow), at 100 Mbps (fast), or at 1000 Mbps (gigabit); these institutional links are connected via eight area routers to a gigabit ethernet CUDN backbone network (see above). During the year, the number of fast or gigabit connections increased from 76 to 98 (26 of them gigabit) while that of slow ones fell from 73 to 55 (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.

26. Software upgrades, configuration changes, and the activation of multilayer switching all helped the CUDN to cope with the increased use of the IP multicast service by eScience projects, pending the installation of the new SRIF-funded backbone routers. In February, the CUDN interface switches in three Departments were replaced after they were found to be causing data corruption and so threatening the integrity of the PWF service. After lengthy technical investigations, and concern about the effect of US export controls on the availability of 'strong encryption' software, July 2002 saw the start of a pilot Virtual Private Network (VPN) service, to provide remote access to the CUDN via other Internet Service Providers. Staff also investigated joining the JANET experimental IP v6 service, to try out its end-system implementations. Magpie continued to have about 2,000 users; the older V.34 modem service was withdrawn as planned while additional lines were obtained for the V.90 56 Kbps service.

Network support and network installation

27. Network Support staff continued to advise individual institutions about wiring buildings, installing LANs, and obtaining CUDN connections; there were again just over 200 consultations in total, equally divided between Colleges and University institutions. Although total demand was slightly down this year, the Network Installation team still carried out or supervised work which included 27 new fast or gigabit ethernet installations or upgrades (compared to 30 in 2000-01), optical fibre installation work at 27 sites (25), copper wiring at 15 (30), two new network equipment installations (11), and one test of existing cables (5). Several emergency visits were also needed to repair cable damage, including rodent damage.

Network-related services

Electronic mail

28. Although the statistical data on e-mail in the Annex is distorted by the inadvertent loss of a month's data and the effects of the Klez e-mail attachment virus, it is clear that there was a 30% or more rise in the overall volume of mail handled by Hermes (from 602 GB to 781 GB ignoring distortions) and that most of this was due to an increase in average message length. The number of Hermes users rose from 27,900 to 28,900, due to a combination of new users and existing e-mail users moving over from CUS. The existing Hermes hardware coped well with the extra Michaelmas Term load while the installation of major (and somewhat overdue) software and firmware upgrades in December, which also involved considerable data re-organization, was carefully planned and went ahead smoothly. Although systems effort was in short supply for a while after one of the two programmers moved to the Information group, the Mail group was fortunate in recruiting a well-qualified replacement at the first attempt.

29. A major new development this year was the locally written Webmail system, which allows users to send and receive electronic mail via the Internet. After a small scale pilot service during Michaelmas had provided operational experience and useful feedback on the user interface, Webmail was released for general use in the Lent Term and pronounced fully operational in July. The uptake by users increased steadily during the year, but since the initial system design had taken into account efficiency requirements, it was well able to cope. Further functional development of Webmail in 2002-03 is unlikely, as Mail group resources must soon be devoted to a serious effort to enhance the basic Hermes mailstore engine.

Information Services

30. This group ensures that all Computing Service documentation, whether on paper or on the Web, is accurate, up-to-date, and easy to use. A revised version of last year's pilot online University Map was produced in September to accompany the release of the printed version by the Press and is being regularly updated. During the year, the group updated the Service's Web pages, installed the Guide to Courses, Cambridge Discovery, and the Undergraduate Prospectus 2003 on the University Web server and, with help from Systems and Unix, made arrangements to allow the Press Office to change the news story on the University front page without help from the group. When one of the Mail group changed to a job working partly on documentation, her first task was, appropriately, to write the helptext for the WebMail service.

31. By the end of the year, the Web server was hosting pages for 205 University societies (up from 180 in 2000-01), while 56 (42) institutions with the ability to author pages but no wish to run their own server were using the managed Web server service. Staff also continued to provide input to the University Web Site Steering Committee, to organize useful and well-attended meetings of local Webmasters and to make presentations at national meetings of University information staff. The Technical Librarians dealt with 6,350 enquiries to Webmaster (12.5% more than the 5,644 in 2000-01), maintained the staff library, established user libraries for new Managed Clusters (and maintained them for existing ones), and also collected contact information for departments (in XML format, for use in several different places).

32. The commercial Ultraseek software used on the Computing Service Web search engine produces a single index of the contents of all 'official' servers within the cam.ac.uk domain and allows external users to locate the material they want by removing the need to know or guess in advance which server may hold it. It also facilitates complex searches and searches within individual servers. Table 1 above compares the use in July 2002 with July 2001.

33. Total incoming requests to the main University website (http://www.cam.ac.uk/) were 112.2m (compared to 65.5m in 2000-01). They came from over 190 country-level domains (190), with a daily peak of 540,000 (304,000). Table 2 above compares July 2002 with July 2001.

34. The local and national Web caches automatically maintain copies of recently referenced documents with the dual aim of improving retrieval times and reducing the need for external network traffic. The increase in load at the start of Michaelmas 2001 was the first real test of the new PC-based local cache, which coped very well and averted a previously looming performance crisis. By close monitoring, the cache support team tracked down an extremely obscure problem which while not readily visible to users would have severely limited the overall performance. Table 3 above compares local cache activity in July 2002 and July 2001.

35. Although one might expect to improve overall performance by setting the local cache to use the national cache experiments showed that this was not always true, so staff kept a close eye on the system and adjusted its settings as necessary to maintain acceptable results. The national cache is to close down in December 2002 but the Computing Service is in no doubt that it will be worthwhile to continue to develop the Cambridge cache and to promote its use.

36. Cambridge users continued to benefit from the Computing Service's USENET news server, which by giving access to thousands of local and world-wide news groups, allows them to distribute information on, and to contribute to the discussion of, a very wide range of topics. Table 4 above compares the levels of activity during July 2002 and July 2001.

Centrally-managed services

Public Workstation Facility

37. Staff from the Small Systems and Operations groups continued to support both the centrally managed Public Workstation Facility and the charged Managed Cluster Service (see below) and to roll out a new basic Windows NT image each quarter. To help with their development work, a PWF test laboratory room was made as part of the office refurbishments. A count in January showed that the combined PWF and MCS clusters contained 850 PCs and 170 Macintoshes and that as many as 350 were often concurrently logged on. Because of the absence of statistical data from mid-April to end July 2001, the table overleaf compares full year figures for 2001-02 with (in italics) those for the first 8 and a half months of 2000-01.

Public Workstation Facility

N.B. In general, undergraduates are registered as College users and postgraduates as University ones.

38. When last summer's major changes, including the introduction of Novell NetWare 5.1 and Windows 2000 Pro, were exposed to the step change in load at the start of the academic year, the resulting problems included file corruption on the servers holding user files and a rash of 'broken profiles', which had to be worked around until one of the Churchill computer staff came up with a more permanent fix. Devolved user print account administration using Pcounter was gradually introduced across the PWF, although some Colleges later restricted printing to members only. IP was used for various inter-server communications as the first stage of a planned move away from Novell's IPX-based protocols, while the arrival of two additional MCS-funded programmers allowed other staff to resume work on the proposed pilot service using Windows Terminal Server. Finally, during the Long Vacation 2002, the total disc storage capacity available for users' personal files was doubled to 280 GB.

Central Unix Service, Thor, and PWF Linux

39. With the help of routine upgrades to its systems and applications software, the Central Unix Service continued to run smoothly and to be widely used by researchers throughout the University. The rationale for (and use made of) the related Thor facility disappeared after PWF Linux (see below) was generally acclaimed as more suitable for Unix-based taught courses. After widespread user consultation, it was decided to close Thor from August 2002, with the taught courses (in Computer Science, Chemistry, and Physics) moving to PWF Linux and access to other Web server facilities being provided for those courses which need them. The table below presents information on CUS and Thor usage in 2001-02, with 2000-01 in italics:

Central Unix Service

	CPU		Users
University	91.8%	92.3%	2,780	3,135
Colleges	7.3%	6.9%	334	378
External	0.9%	0.8%	38	38
TOTAL	100.0%	100.0%	3,152	3,551
Thor
	CPU		Users
University	9.2%	8.6%	62	66
Colleges	90.8%	91.4%	156	402
TOTAL	100.0%	100.0%	218	468

40. Following much hard development work by the Unix Support Group, PWF Linux was available by October 2001 on all the centrally managed PWF clusters and (as a chargeable addition) on many Managed Clusters (some of which had taken up the further option of a remotely accessible Linux server). During the Michaelmas Term, various teething problems took up much support effort but were eventually overcome thanks to the help, co-operation, and forbearance of the pioneer users, especially those from Physics. Although the resulting PWF Linux then proved to be extremely successful in general and much more suitable for the undergraduate taught courses than the Thor multi-user system, staff subsequently spent much of the Long Vacation 2002 working on an improved version for the new academical year.

User administration

41. This group again handled with quiet efficiency all its regular tasks, from the mass pre-registration of incoming students and re-registration of Magpie users in September through to the Long Vacation cancellations of leavers and temporary registration of the many summer school and conference attendees who require access to computing facilities. When most new students wishing to notify their consent to be included in the University's web-based e-mail search database used paper forms rather than a Web page, staff were left with thousands of barcodes to scan in but there was a better response to a new Web form which allowed users to apply online for additional disc space and usually obtain a same day response. The Jackdaw database, which underpins all Computing Service user account and IP address management, underwent substantial enhancement, with separation of the underlying database engine from the applications system and re-development of the interfaces used by the user administration staff.

42. During the year, Computing Service staff worked with Management Information Services and the Senior Tutors on the CamCORS online supervisions reporting project. User Administration will provide the registration mechanism and issue supervisors with passwords, starting during the Long Vacation, ready for the official launch in October 2002. The group's manager also helped produce the project definition study for the CamSIS student records database and attended a working group on the establishment of a harassment adviser network.

Pelican data archive service

43. To enable the Pelican data archive to keep pace with user requirements, a new disc system capable of holding a terabyte (1000 GB) of data was installed. Teething troubles, mainly to do with the environmental monitoring module, delayed the operational deployment of the equipment, while in August 2002 the system had to be shut down for several days when the RAID system was unable to recover from individual disc faults (apparently because some of the parity information was incorrect). However, by the end of the year Pelican was storing 250 GB of data (25% up on last year's 200 GB) for 932 different users (920) from over 80 University institutions and Colleges. The two largest institutional holdings were again those of the University Library (for scanned photographic data, experiments in electronic document storage and other projects) and the Computing Service (for backup of programs and data).

High Performance Computing Facility

44. The High Performance Computing Facility (which has a separate committee of management) continued to be housed in the Computing Service and to use the services of a senior programmer from the Service with a particular interest in advanced computing systems.

Support services

Software sales

45. The Software Sales group continued to supply the University with competitively priced software through CHEST (Combined HE Software Team) and other deals and to administer University-wide support agreements for Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations. The CHEST Microsoft Select 4 agreement was replaced by Select 5, which runs until October 2003 and is more restrictive in that it allows no sharing of licences between machines and, in a formal tendering procedure, a new retailer was chosen to supply Select 5 licences to the University. Although order processing performance was poor from November to January because of staff changes it improved from February onwards as the new arrivals became fully trained. The table below summarizes sales by product type for 2001-02, with 2000-01 in italics.

Managed Cluster Service

46. Institutions join the Managed Cluster Service (MCS) to simplify the management of their general-access computer rooms by paying the Computing Service to support the Novell NetWare servers and the software on the individual workstations. Service staff update the software (which consists of the standard PWF image with optional additional applications) each quarter and also make regular visits to deal with problems and assess new requirements. Of the 25 MCS clusters at the start of the year (thirteen in Colleges and twelve in Departments), eleven were using shared servers located in the Computing Service rather than hosting their own. During the Christmas Vacation the cluster at the Computer Laboratory was completed and new clusters were added at New Hall and Law. During summer 2002 new clusters were added at Geography, Robinson, St John's, and Wolfson. The Modern and Medieval Languages cluster was split off from the Arts and Humanities one, nine more existing clusters converted to using shared servers located in the Service and ten added or upgraded their individual workstations.

External hardware maintenance

47. Engineering group staff repair equipment for institutions and individuals either as part of a full cover contract service or, more commonly, on a charged time and materials basis and also carry out warranty repairs for University customers of certain manufacturers. The tables summarize repair work carried out during 2001-02, with figures for 2000-01 in italics.

Equipment repaired by Type
	Contract		Non-contract
IBM PC, etc.	289	147	246	138
Apple Macintosh	28	46	92	89
Printers	96	97	101	137
Laptops	5	5	201	192
Other equipment	51	95	81	113
TOTAL	469	390	721	669
Equipment repaired by Institution
	Contract		Non-contract
University	309	208	511	473
Colleges	160	182	207	190
External			3	6
TOTAL	469	390	721	669

Printing and Reproduction Service

48. The end of leases on the Xerox Docutech and Afga colour machines closely coincided with the move of the Computer Laboratory (although the Computing Service will continue to produce much of their lecture course material for the time being). New equipment, with a considerably downsized capacity and consisting of one monochrome and one colour Ricoh Aficio machines, was installed in December, and has since proved very reliable. Total monochrome throughput for the year was 780 K impressions for the Computing Service (compared to 910 K in 2000-01), 790 K for the Computer Laboratory (810 K), and 470 K for external customers (600 K), while the colour copy totals were: Service 2.5 K (7K); Laboratory 1.1 K (1.4 K); external customers 5.4 K (7.2 K).

Photography and Illustration Service (PandIS)

49. The throughput of traditional photography recovered, with 7,900 rolls of E6 film (up from 7,300 in 2000-01) and 167 K colour prints (133 K) being processed. A total of 7,500 slides (6,700) were produced, including 4,200 from digital input, and in its second year the digital scanning service handled 780 films (260) and over 1,300 mounted slides or other items. Staff on the illustration side produced almost 1,700 posters (2,000) of which 850 were also encapsulated and undertook graphic design work for 40 institutions throughout the University. Finally, at General Admission and other Congregations staff took almost 9,000 photographs (8,300) of graduands inside the Senate House and a further 2,500 on the Lawn, while also expanding into the sale of frames for their prints and degree certificates.

Video-conferencing Service

50. Much of the use of the Computing Service facility this year has switched from ISDN to IP conferencing, mainly for cost reasons, and as the available bandwidth increases IP is expected to become the norm. The addition of projection facilities plus a PC with whiteboard, extra camera, and monitor has enabled the suite to host lectures, presentations, and other teaching which are transmitted simultaneously to a variety of sites (both local and remote), all of which have full interactive feedback facilities; these features have been much used and appreciated by Departments working with MIT under the CMI initiative. Total suite usage during the year was 146.5 hours from 81 bookings (compared to 132 from 72 in 2000-01). In January, staff and suite participated in the British Educational Training and Technology show.

51. Issues such as the CMI initiative, the eScience AccessGrid project, and a Government bid to install video-conferencing in all schools raised the profile of video-conferencing in the University and staff were kept busy providing consultancy about proposed new facilities at Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Architecture, New Addenbrooke's, Applied Mathematics, and the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, as well as the recently launched services at the CMI, the Judge Institute of Management Studies, and the Centre for Applied Research into Educational Technologies. Staff also collaborated with Anglia Polytechnic University on technical issues concerning IP video-conferencing and are currently working on a project with the AccessGrid.

Advice and consultancy

Technical User Support

52. Technical User Support (TUS) staff support the wide range of application software on the centrally managed facilities, run the Computing Service/University Library Electronic Reference Library system and apply updates to its ten widely used databases and manage and largely staff the advice and consultancy, Help Desk, and Techlink services (see below). At the Sidgwick Site, TUS provides general support and is also responsible for the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre (LLCC), which provides a specialist service for the humanities.

53. As more hackers targeted Windows systems, the NT Support group had to deal with the consequences of the Code Red and Nimda worms and exploitation of vulnerabilities in Microsoft SQL-Server (see above). NT Support also prepared a three-day course on upgrading from Windows NT4 to Windows 2000 and Active Directory, and gave it to local computer support staff in April and again in May. TUS also installed the KeyServer use monitoring and licence count software on the PWF Macintoshes and provided Service staff with a hardware installation, hard disc backup and virus software update service for their desktop machines.

Help Desk and Techlink

54. During the year, the Help Desk logging software was successfully transferred to a more powerful Solaris system with an upgraded version of the underlying Oracle database. The table summarizes Help Desk calls for 2001-02 (with 2000-01 figures in italics):

After a small drop in the previous year, the number of calls went up by 6%; the proportion of calls made by telephone (47%) continued to increase steadily, well outstripping calls in person (26%) or by e-mail (27%). By far the most popular call topic was electronic mail. There were small rises in the proportions of calls closed within 1 hour (from 85.5% to 86.4%) and within 24 hours (from 90.9% to 91.8%); 2.1% of calls were referred to local computer staff when Help Desk staff did not have a ready answer to a call about a non-Computing Service facility. The number of calls initiated by Techlinks went up by 10% (from 1,444 to 1,582) and the time spent by Computing Service staff in finding the answers by 16%, to over 900 person-hours.

55. The Techlink scheme, which provides 'fast track' backup and general support to local computer support staff, seems to have stabilized at a membership around 300 and to have produced a real sense of community among support staff, who regularly using its mailing lists to seek (and usually to find) all kinds of advice and information, from their peers as well as from Computing Service staff. The Techlink seminars were very well supported and went from strength to strength, with sessions given by Management Information Services Division and Library staff, other Techlinks and outside suppliers as well as Service staff. Highlights included an overview of Windows XP (on the day before its official launch), technical talks by Intel and Microsoft staff (organised by Viglen), a hands-on seminar by Apple on MacOS X, and talks by Library staff on the Voyager catalogue software and by University Card staff on creating Web user interfaces using Perl.

Training

56. Computing Service training courses both help reduce the advice and consultancy load, and enable users to make better use of their computers. After advertising postcards were sent out to all staff in October, the resulting increase in enquiries translated into a 5% increase in that term's attendances and the need to schedule additional courses on popular topics such as Photoshop and Unix. (Fortunately, a new and more flexible course administration database had just come into service.) For the Easter term, the popular Web page authoring courses were substantially revised, while exit surveys generally reported both positive feedback and high levels of customer satisfaction. The table below summarizes academic course attendance information for 2001-02, with 2000-01 in italics. In addition, 412 assistant staff attended 44 Personnel Division funded course sessions (up from 212 and 31 in 2000-01), the self teaching courseware was as popular as ever and Service trainers again provided customized courses on request, to customers including College administrative staff, the Careers Service, and History.

Course Attendance

57. In June, the fourth course on Dr Hazel's Exim Mail Transfer Agent proved the most popular yet, with 125 attendees, 17 from abroad. During the year, the Computing Service prepared to provide online teaching and certification for the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), which is internationally recognized as a measure of basic computing skills. A pilot scheme for staff from certain Departments, part-funded by the Staff Development Office, will start in October 2002, and if all goes well will be extended to staff from October 2003; the inclusion of students will be investigated once the scheme is working smoothly.

58. The total load on the Computing Service training facilities, including a significant amount of use by some Departments to give their own computing courses, went up from 436 sessions in 2000-01 to 501 in 2001-02. By August 2002, the two new 40-seater classrooms (see above) were ready for use, but since the old and unsatisfactory classrooms in the Old Music School they replace have been given up, there are still likely to be severe scheduling difficulties at popular times. In addition, a member of Unix Support, with his own experience of RSI problems, has overseen the creation and equipping of an Access Technologies room and has used it to develop and give one-to-one training on the Dragon Naturally Speaking voice software which its owners readily acknowledge to be better than their own courses.

Unix support

59. One of the major successes of this group, the development of PWF Linux, has already been mentioned. Another is the week-long Linux System Administration course, which is given twice a year, is always popular and has now been attended by the vast majority of Unix systems administrators in the University. The group is also responsible for maintaining the friendly probing software, the Unix Support server (very heavily relied on by the Unix community, at its disc space limit and about to be replaced by a bigger system) and the managed Web server (due to be replaced by a 'next generation' facility when time permits). Finally, direct institutional support, most commonly help with recovering from security incidents, was provided to institutions including the Management Information Services Division, Chemistry, Physics, four Colleges, and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Support for purchases of personal systems

60. Computing Service staff again maintained regular contact with major suppliers and used information and feedback from this and other sources to advise institutions and individual users, both in person and via Web pages, about economic sources of personal computer systems to suit their particular needs. Close liaison was maintained with the University Purchasing Office. At the sixth Annual Demonstration Day in November, hundreds of University users saw exhibitions and demonstrations from 18 exhibitors, featuring a wide range of hardware and software, together with ancillary equipment and services.

Directorate and liaison

Institution liaison

61. This division keeps in touch about computing matters at institution level with both senior management and computer support staff, its two staff being assisted as required by members of the Directorate, Network Support, and Technical User Services. Staff helped those Departments facing the last of the old style TQA assessments with advice on the preparation of IT-related base materials, attended Learning Resources meetings and arranged for assessors to visit the central PWF classrooms. They also saw to the annual update of the table of College IT Provision for Students, which has proved so useful in this and other contexts.

62. Staff from the division accepted requests to attend computer committee or similar meetings at individual institutions (60 at Colleges and 140 at University organizations - in total one-fifth less than for 2000-01); assisted with staff selection on 30 occasions and helped introduce a dozen new staff into the idiosyncrasies of computing in Cambridge. They again organized both well attended termly meetings for all departmental and/or College computer staff and smaller liaison meetings where staff from the Computing Service and the Library or Management Information Services discussed issues of mutual interest. Finally, staff continued to chair the Windows Integration Group and attended meetings of the Syndicate's Technical Committee, the JTMC and its Technical Sub-committee and the Cambridge eScience Forum.

Statistical Annex

Statistical Annex

[Note: the figures and tables of the Statistical Annex are reproduced online in .PDF format.]

Previous page

Table of Contents

Next page

Cambridge University Reporter, Monday 20 January 2003
Copyright © 2003 The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Cambridge.