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Report of the Information Technology Syndicate on the University Computing
Service for 2002-03

Introduction

1. The remit of the Information Technology Syndicate is to develop computing policy for the University and the Colleges and to supervise the work of the Computing Service. This Report and Statistical Annex cover the activities of the Syndicate and the Service for the year 1 August 2002 to 31 July 2003. Although the printed version of the Annex gives only top level summaries of service use, breakdowns to the level of individual institutions are available on the World Wide Web at http://www.cam.ac.uk/CS/ITSyndicate/AnnRep/stats02.03.pdf. Note that the Report only attempts to give a general picture of the width and volume of Service activities and so the statistical information makes no attempt at being fully comprehensive.

Syndicate matters

2. Under Professor Longair's continuing chairmanship, the IT Syndicate discussed a wide variety of issues. Those which were directly concerned with Computing Service activities and are described elsewhere in the Report included recovering JANET traffic costs, a pilot progamme for staff to obtain the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) qualification, a revised version of the document setting out staff and customer responsibilities in the operation of the Managed Cluster Service, the formal establishment of a Computing Commodity Group to carry forward the Service's purchasing advice activities, and draft guidelines for computer support staff investigating allegations of child abuse and other illegal material on computers. The Technical Committee, chaired by Dr Heath, assisted these discussions with some very useful input on their more technological aspects.

3. The Syndicate also discussed using some Science Research Infrastructure Fund (SRIF) money for local networking projects to complement the earlier expenditure on general increases in University Data Network bandwidth and, as a result, projects are in hand for the upgrading of network switching and routing equipment in several Departments. The Syndicate approved a new set of Computer Officer Grading Criteria which took into account the rationalized salary scales introduced with effect from June 2002; these criteria are widely used to grade jobs and to advise appointing bodies throughout the University and the Colleges. The Syndicate also received the Internal Auditors report on Software Licensing and produced recommendations for inclusion in the University's response. Finally, the Syndicate welcomed reports from the Director of the Management Information Services Division on his plans for administrative computing, including the CamSIS project, and from the Chairman of the Joint Telecommunications Committee on plans to upgrade the telephone network.

Accommodation and building work

4. In September 2002, a Computing Service bid to use the vacant half of Arup Floor 2 for an additional teaching room and a small computer room lost out to one from Materials Science, although the teaching need was partly offset when Professor Leslie agreed that some Computer Laboratory space on Cockcroft Floor 4 might be equipped and used for courses on Sun system software. Towards the end of the year, while preparing to comply with changes in the fire regulations by replacing the halon fire suppressant system in the main computer room with an argon-based one, great difficulty was experienced in finding suitable space for the greatly increased number of gas bottles this would require and the Service is extremely grateful for permission from Materials Science to put the bottles in part of their Arup Floor 2 area.

5. The Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for the main computer room failed to operate normally on several occasions; investigations showed that the ambient temperature in its room was high enough to seriously reduce the life of the batteries and air-conditioning was installed. The UPDS subsequently worked well and, as an example, kept central services going on a morning in February when there was a major break in the power supply to much of the city. By the end of the year, however, as the power requirements in the computer room continued to increase, the provision of significant additional UPS capacity was under investigation.

The Computing Service

6. The facilities and services provided by the Computing Service to users throughout the University and Colleges can be summarized as follows:

Facilities which can only be provided on a University-wide basis, such as networks and electronic mail;

Centrally managed services which provide computing resources to individual members of the University, such as the Public Workstation Facility (PWF) and the Central Unix Service (CUS);

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

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

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

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 has five operating divisions, two which manage the central facilities and give specialized technical support, and three which provide more general support services to individual users and institutions, either directly or via local computer support staff.

The Network division looks after 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, and Pelican archive services, systems support for Web services, and Unix support to individual institutions;

The Technical User Support division has responsibilities which include 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 looks after 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.

	2003 (£000)
	Centrally Funded				Cost	Combined Total
Service	Staff	Other	Total	%	Recovery	2003	2002
Network	530	511	1,041	23.4%	380	1,421	1,423
Network-related	437	150	587	13.2%	28	615	509
PWF	416	93	509	11.4%		509	682
CUS	144	15	159	3.6%		159	168
Other centrally run facilities	200	20	220	5.0%	32	252	246
Software sales	99	0	99	2.2%	615	714	744
Managed Cluster service	2	0	2	0.0%	188	190	178
Other charged support services	245	0	245	5.6%	388	634	607
Advice and consultancy	692	43	735	16.5%		735	725
Directorate, liaison, and staff eqpt	377	101	478	10.7%	9	487	424
Administration and overheads	186	188	374	8.4%		374	364
TOTAL	3,329	1,121	4,450	100.0%	1,641	6,091	6,120

8. The table above summarizes the estimated cost of providing each of the various facilities and services (with 2002 figures in italics), giving separately those costs met from central funding (UEF, equipment grant, and SRIF) and those recovered from charges to users. The cost recovery services total is £1.64m (27% of all costs), compared with £1.62m (26.5%) in 2002 and £1.57m (29%) in 2001.

Network security

9. Each month, thousands of malicious probes were made against computers connected to the CUDN. However, thanks to the vigilance and speedy response of staff in many parts of the Computing Service (including the on-going 'friendly probing' programme), backed up by the continuing efforts of system managers across the University to rapidly install new system software security patches as they became available, the monthly total of machines which had been successfully hacked rarely exceeded 20 (and even in October, when there were so many new student machines around, only reached 50). This was just as well, given the disruption caused by each security breach and the support staff time needed to recover from it.

10. The Cambridge Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) first realized the scale of the probing problem in August 2002, after developing scripts to automatically extract the relevant information from the CUDN traffic summaries. The monthly probe total immediately quadrupled from 400 (based on user notifications) to 1,600 and continued to rise steadily until March 2003 when, following the announcement of a new Windows vulnerability, it doubled overnight to 7,800. The numbers then fell off slightly, but for the rest of the year the Cambridge reports to JANET-CERT were indicating over 200 probes per day. Overall, because of the new way of recording probing, the total number of probes and incidents recorded during the year was 54,786 (compared with only 2,096 in 2001-02). While the main target was consistently Microsoft services on port 445, the details changed from month to month as new worms and reports of software vulnerabilities appeared; there were fewer probes in total for Linux and other Unix systems but they still presented a significant problem.

11. Over the Christmas break, CERT observed a week-long (and thankfully unsuccessful) brute force passwords attack on MS-SQL servers, while in January the Slammer worm (with the same target) accounted for over 1,600 probes and eight successfully hacked machines. Over the Easter holiday, an attempted hack too far on CUS led CERT to discover 15 compromised Linux machines, some dating back to the previous October. Demonstrating that anything and everything connected to the CUDN may be hacked, in March CERT found an 'eggdrop' case involving an unpatched Solaris machine attached to a photocopier. Finally, the relative quiet of the Long Vacation was shattered in mid-August 2003 by the appearance of the Lovsan/MSBlaster and Nachi worms, immediately followed by the Sobig.F virus. Many personal computers across the University were affected and the new virus scanning software (see below) was fully activated ahead of schedule to deal with the flood of Sobig e-mail, finding and destroying 365,000 viral messages in 10 days (with a peak rate of 15,000 an hour).

12. The following paragraphs provide information on each of the individual facilities and services provided by the Computing Service.

Network

JANET and EastNet

13. Cambridge accesses the Joint Academic Network (JANET) via the EastNet regional network, which has its primary JANET connection in the Computing Service and also serves Anglia Polytechnic, Cranfield, East Anglia, Essex, Hertfordshire, and Luton Universities, and Writtle College. The only serious loss of JANET connectivity during the year was for 5.5 hours on Saturday, 2 November, when completely independent but contemporaneous faults brought down both branches of the resilient link to the SuperJANET core in London.

JANET traffic costs

14. As explained in last year's Report, the IT Syndicate had agreed to recover the 2002-03 charge to Cambridge as a whole (pre-set at £162,231) from individual institutions by means of quarterly charges similar to those for transatlantic traffic costs but based on the total of incoming and outgoing traffic of all types through the JANET gateway router. This scheme operated well; the largest yearly total for an individual institution was £11,200 (up from £9,700 in 2001-02 under the previous method of calculation) and the list of the top ten contributors consisted of eight Colleges plus Physics and Engineering. The new charging regime from August 2003 will be based only on the total income of each HEI. Although the total to be recovered from all institutions has increased from £4.15m to £4.95m, the Cambridge amount was due to fall slightly, but has been frozen at the 2002-03 level for one year in order to cap the substantial percentage rises which would have applied to some other HEIs.

15. From the start of the year, JANET traffic data for individual institutions, aggregated for various periods (daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly) and sorted by overall total, was shown on the Web in the same way as the transatlantic traffic data had been. From April, this was supplemented by similar data for the top 20 individual hosts within each institution. The ready availability of this information to local computer support staff greatly reduced the number of occasions on which Network Support needed to contact them about individual hosts in their institution with abnormally high levels of network traffic.

Granta Backbone Network

16. The GBN Management Committee continued to delegate all operational matters to Network division staff. Cable re-routings on account of building works were planned and/or carried out at the Addenbrooke's Hospital Site, Homerton, St Catharine's and Downing playing fields, and at Fenner's, where the GBN routes are affected by the construction both of the University's Cricket School and new accommodation for Hughes Hall. It became clear that many current College Bursars, not having been in post when the GBN was installed, were unaware both of the corporate nature of the network and its wayleaves policy, so a page with the relevant information has been added to the GBN web site. This year's concentration on building matters should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, eleven years after its initial installation, the GBN continues, both successfully and unobtrusively, to provide for the many communications needs of an increasingly diverse and widespread University community.

Cambridge University Data Network

17. Since the completion of the installation of gigabit Cisco router equipment in August 2002, this year's SRIF networking projects have been concerned with departmental needs (see above), but plans are under way to further increase the CUDN backbone bandwidth in late 2003 by installing 10 Gbps equipment. The backbone's eight area routers connect individual institutions using either slow (10 Mbps or less), fast (100 Mbps), or gigabit (1000 Mbps) ethernet links. During the year, the gigabit connections increased from 26 to 35 and fast connections from 72 to 76, while the number of slow connections fell from 55 to 46 (for fuller details see the Annex). In general, each of these connections supports one or more local area networks (LANs) which themselves interconnect equipment in a whole building or even a whole Department. As an indication of the practically universal need for network access in today's University, new connections included the Lady Mitchell Hall, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), the Disability Resource Centre, and the Proctors (Greenwich House).

18. The Virtual Private Dial-up Network (VPDN) pilot service has significant technical problems, although client software for Windows 9x, NT, 2000, and XP is now working adequately. The equivalent client software for Macintosh and Unix platforms is still being sought. The VPDN router also firewalls outgoing FTP sessions, which allows high-numbered TCP ports to be blocked for security reasons without disrupting FTP data connections. The Magpie service, which continued to have around 2,000 users, moved to a new access server which supports the latest technical developments. In the way of modem services, this change brought problems for some previously trouble-free users, which had to be tracked down and fixed.

Network support and Network installation

19. Individual institutions were again given advice by Network Support staff about wiring buildings, installing LANs, and obtaining CUDN connections; out of some 190 consultations in all (compared to 200 in 2001-02), around 70% were for University institutions. As is only to be expected given the ubiquity and maturity of the CUDN, the totals for different kinds of installation work carried out or supervised by Network staff for the Computing Service and other institutions were similar to previous years with 27 new or upgraded ethernet installations (compared to 27 in 2001-02), optical fibre installation work at 26 sites (27), copper wiring at 22 (15), 8 new network equipment installations (2), and 3 tests of existing cables (1).

IP addresses

20. The steps already set in motion to deal with the potential shortage of 32-bit Internet Protocol (IPv4) addresses (see last year's Report) worked well, while a new mechanism, which automatically issues IPv4 addresses to institutions against requests made via a Web form and records the allocations in a database, was both welcomed by local computer support staff and saved central staff effort. The Computing Service joined JANET's experimental IPv6 (64-bit addresses) service and made arrangements to allow both Service and institutional staff to try out the IPv6 software which is becoming available from suppliers without impacting the IPv4 service. By the end of the year, the total of IPv4 addresses in use throughout the University was almost 52,300 (compared with 47,000 in 2001-02), with about 34,000 (30,500) being used for equipment in individual University institutions and 16,800 (15,000) by the Colleges. While most addresses continued to be global, some 1,400 CUDN-wide private addresses were being used for equipment which only needs to be accessed from within the cam.ac.uk domain.

Network-related services

Electronic mail

21. During the year, major software development effort, backed up by the purchase and installation of extensive PC cluster hardware, went into two projects. The first involved finding, and tailoring to local requirements, better anti-spam and anti-virus software for the mail switch. The problem of 'spam' (uninvited and unwanted mass e-mail) continues to worsen and, although now receiving attention at national and international levels, is unlikely to go away quickly. Simply blocking all mail from known spam addresses is no longer effective, so the new software uses various tests to label each message with its 'spam score'. Individual users may then choose a level and ask the system to reject all messages with scores above it; this allows each person to strike their own balance between being hard on spam at the cost of rejecting some wanted e-mail or reducing that risk at the cost of accepting more spam.

22. The new software, introduced during the Easter Term, also contains a new virus scanner which aims to identify infected e-mails and to disinfect them where possible or delete them where not. The scanner was still being piloted when the Sobig.F virus arrived in August 2003, but was rushed into full service (and the relevant expert returned early from holiday) with the satisfactory results reported above under Network Security. The second e-mail project is to develop new software for the Hermes mail store, since its present system cannot be scaled to cope with the expected growth in demand for more than another year or two; after good progress during the year, a pilot version of the software should be ready for testing in Michaelmas 2003. Meanwhile the locally written Webmail interface to Hermes continued to prove very popular in Cambridge and was used or trialled by several other UK universities.

23. One can side-step the known problems with the 2001-02 e-mail statistics (see Annex) by comparing 2000-01 with 2002-03. The overall picture is then of two-year increases of 101% in the total volume of mail handled by Hermes (from 602 GB to 1212 GB), of 42% in the number of messages (from 56.7m to 80.3m), and of 11% in the total number of users (from 27,900 to 31,075). On average, the number of messages per user rose by 32% (from 1,963 to 2,585), while there was a 42% rise in message length (from 1.06 KB to 1.51 KB).

Information and Web services

24. The Information Group looks after all Computing Service documentation, both on the Web and on paper. By January, staff had updated the content of the Service's own Web pages (including the latest information on the PWF) and converted them to the University's new house style. Admissions information on the central University Web server was also updated, including the Guide to Courses, Natural Sciences Tripos specifications, and the Undergraduate Prospectus 2004. The Technical Librarians dealt with 12,798 messages to Webmaster on the central server (double the 6,350 in 2001-02), which included both enquiries from all over the world and a great deal of 'spam'; in this context the new e-mail filtering arrangements (see above) are welcome but must be used with care to avoid losing genuine messages.

25. In addition to continuing to organize well-attended meetings and other general support for local Webmasters, the Computing Service's Web content design expert spent much time dispensing advice about Web accessibility requirements under the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Act 2001 and also, as a member of the HERO Technical Group, investigated local technical requirements and solutions for putting TQA data on the Web.

26. A Personal Web Pages service, introduced in October 2002, allows students and other users to publish pages from their PWF filespaces and has been extended to provide group page facilities (e.g. for student project work). Customers of the Managed Web Server service, which caters for institutions willing to author Web pages but not to host a server, increased from 56 to 58 during the year; replacing the current system by one with more powerful hardware and re-designed software took longer than expected but should be complete for October 2003. The Computing Service continued to host Web pages for University societies and in July 2003 189 of them were using this facility (compared to 205 a year earlier).

27. When Web servers running encrypted services need digital certificates, getting them from the commercial certification authorities usually involves both cost and a good deal of administrative hassle; the Computing Service has established a service which buys certificates in bulk and arranges for them to be issued to servers within the University and related institutions with only slightly less cost but much less hassle. Towards the end of the year, work started on a pilot central web authentication server, which should allow individual website managers to use simple access controls not requiring explicit password management while enabling users to access many client websites by quoting a single password.

28. Incoming requests to the main University web- site (http://www.cam.ac.uk/) totalled 148m (compared to 112m in 2001-02), again came from over 190 country-level domains, and had a daily peak of 662,000 (540,000). The Web server table on p. 27 compares May 2003 with May 2002 (since the May figures give a better picture of the term-time load than those previously included for July).

29. The Computing Service Web search engine uses proprietary software (Ultraseek) to produce a combined index of the contents of all 'official' servers within the cam.ac.uk domain, thereby allowing external users to locate the material they want without the need to know or guess in advance which server may hold it and also facilitating complex searches and searches within individual servers. In September 2002 the software was upgraded to a much newer version with enhanced search facilities and support for a wider range of document types while in April staff finally succeeded in tracking down a very elusive bug which had caused groups of Web pages to be falsely labelled as duplicates (and therefore not included in the index).

30. A potentially more serious problem with the search engine software arose in May when a new owner of Ultraseek requested a large increase in the annual maintenance charge. Although extensive negotiations produced an acceptable interim settlement for 2003-04, costs in future years may well escalate beyond what the Computing Service can afford. Alternatives to Ultraseek are being investigated but nothing suitable has been identified, putting the future of the service in some doubt. The Web Search Engine table on p. 27 compares use in May 2003 and May 2002.

31. By automatically maintaining copies of recently referenced documents, the local Web cache aims to improve retrieval times and reduce the volume of external network traffic. With the national cache closed down and cost-recovery applying to all incoming JANET traffic (see above) arrangements had to be made to ensure that traffic through the local cache was added to the total for the appropriate institution (and not just included in the Computing Service total). To enable users to check that a Web browser is properly configured to use the local cache, Service staff developed an extended version of a tool originally produced at Queens' College. The cache worked well all year and the Web cache table above compares activity in May 2003 and May 2002.

32. The Computing Service USENET news server provides Cambridge users with access to thousands of local and world-wide news groups covering a very wide range of topics. In the Michaelmas Term, after the server was found to be hosting large amounts of illegitimate (and often copyright breaching) material, the maximum size of accepted articles was set low enough to reduce this unwanted traffic while having little or no effect on genuine news postings. Later in the year, the daily volume of inbound news traffic fell by around 90% when Service staff helped identify and correct an obscure configuration problem at one of the University's peer news servers. The News server table above compares levels of activity during May 2003 and May 2002.

Centrally managed services

Public Workstation Facility

33. The Computing Service's Public Workstation Facility, together with the associated charged Managed Cluster Service (MCS, see below), forms the University's main student computing facility (and is also used by significant numbers of staff). The combined PWF and MCS clusters contain around 1,200 PCs and Macintoshes, of which as many as 550 are often in use simultaneously at busy times. Staff from the Small Systems and Operations groups provide technical support including the installation of quarterly software image updates. The table below compares PWF users and sessions for 2002-03 with (in italics) those for 2001-02.

Public Workstation Facility

	Users
University	7,176	(45.5%)	5,976	(46.2%)
Colleges	8,516	(54.0%)	6,901	(53.4%)
External	66	(0.4%)	57	(0.4%)
TOTAL	15,758	(100.0%)	12,934	(100.0%)
	Sessions
University	579,510	(41.1%)	379,034	(35.6%)
Colleges	824,878	(58.6%)	683,285	(64.2%)
External	3,944	(0.3%)	2,523	(0.2%)
TOTAL	1,408,332	(100.0%)	1,064,842	(100.0%)

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

34. At the start of the year, staff were much involved in setting up the Personal Web Pages service (see above), which uses one of the PWF servers. Over Christmas, the servers which hold users' personal files were enhanced and the default filespace limit increased to 50 MB (over twice what it was a year earlier). In January an unexpected side effect of a routine Netware system enhancement caused the filestore servers to fall into a completely unresponsive state under heavy load, leaving new users unable to log-in; after three recurrences in eight days the problem was identified and the appropriate system updates applied. KeyServer was installed to monitor applications software usage on both PCs and Macintoshes and regularly produced useful statistical summaries, while PWF printer output was also closely monitored.

35. Because in any year, there is too little time available at Christmas and Easter for major PWF upgrade work, this has to be done in the Long Vacation between mid-June and mid-September, after which the facility is quite heavily used for pre-Michaelmas taught courses. So, although staff always try to fit in as much work as possible at weekends or in the scheduled 'vulnerable periods' on weekday mornings and early evenings, if problems arise in July and August it may be necessary, despite the inevitable inconvenience this will cause to some University members and visitors, to re-schedule work at short notice outside these times.

36. In January, planning started for the 2003 summer upgrade. The major objectives were to upgrade the Novell NetWare 6 and Directory Service (NDS) software on the servers, to change the PWF Macs to use the System X operating system (which involved replacing the older Mac hardware) and to complete this early enough in the Long Vacation to leave time before Michaelmas to install new applications and check out the old ones. The plans suffered an early set-back in mid-June, when trying to fix some oddities in the existing NDS before starting the upgrade produced first a disc race condition and then, after a mistake was made in trying to recover from that, very bad corruption of the NDS on the CENTRAL fileserver.

37. Even with expert help from Salford, recovery proved very lengthy. User service was restored after a total outage of 4.5 days, but a considerable amount of recovery work still needed completion before returning to the upgrade. Fortunately, after a great deal of very hard work by all the staff concerned, many of whom had to re-arrange holiday plans at rather short notice, the second upgrade attempt on July 19/20 went much more smoothly, as did the Macintosh work in early August and all was more or less back on schedule by mid-September.

38. The PWF Linux service, introduced in 2001-02, has continued to prove extremely successful and, since Trinity joined the MCS in December, has been available on clusters in six Departments, five Colleges, and five Computing Service locations, while four Departments have used it for taught courses. In April, a new PWF Linux image including all the fixes and changes from the previous year was issued, while staff began to prepare for the next year's image.

Central Unix Service

39. Although the Thor teaching facility, having been superseded by the use of PWF Linux, was closed down in August 2002, the Central Unix Service continued to be popular with research users throughout the University and the fall in total users is thought to be mostly mail-only users transferring to Hermes. Applications packages were updated, the default user quota was increased to 40 MB and, when falling use of the Uniras graphical software suite made it hard to justify the cost, it was licensed for one further and final year while its users made other arrangements. The table below shows CUS usage in 2002-03, with 2001-02 in italics:

Central Unix Service

	CPU
University	86.9%	91.8%
Colleges	12.5%	7.3%
External	0.6%	0.9%
TOTAL	100.0%	100.0%

	Users
University	2,328	(84.1%)	2,780	(88.2%)
Colleges	408	(14.7%)	334	(10.6%)
External	31	(1.1%)	38	(1.2%)
TOTAL	2,767	(100.0%)	3,152	(100.0%)

User administration

40. Each year, this group underpins the work of the Computing Service by expertly handling all the administrative work associated with registering thousands of new users (who may be staff, students, summer school attendees, or other visitors), issuing them with resources and making subsequent changes to those allocations as required. To help them, a specially designed Web-based interface to the user database was installed to replace the old character-mode Oracle forms approach. In recent years, after pre-registration for e-mail and the PWF, the password details for all new students have been sent to them on paper via their College office, but from September 2003 the postgraduates will be able use a new system, successfully piloted in the Easter Term, to allow them to collect their passwords more quickly via a Web interface.

41. Although, by the time the CamCORS online supervisions reporting system came into operation in October 2002, some 2,300 supervisors had already been registered for it, staff still had to deal with many additional registrations and other enquiries during the Michaelmas Term. Supervisor familiarity with the system improved however, and the load in the other two terms fell significantly. Some staff were also trained to issue e-science certificates on request to Cambridge users. While the User Administration manager continued her involvement with CamCORS, she also spent much time on planning for the CamSIS student records project, being a member of both the Steering Group and the Technical Special Interest Group.

Pelican data archive service and D-Space@Cambridge CMI project

42. Once a satisfactory workaround had been found for the bug which brought the system down for a week in August 2002 (see last year's Report), Pelican worked well for the rest of the year. In April its capacity was doubled (to a nominal 2 terabytes) as a matter of urgency after one of the University Library's digitization projects caused problems because of the size of the downloads that were being made into the archive. By July 2003, Pelican was storing 539 GB of data (115% up on last year's 250 GB) for 966 different users (932) from 86 University institutions and Colleges. The University Library had by far the largest holdings (for scanned photographic data, experimental electronic document storage, and other projects) followed by the Computing Service (for back-up programs and data).

43. The DSpace@Cambridge project, which is being carried out by the Computing Service and the University Library, is funded by a grant from the Cambridge-MIT Institute and aims to implement in Cambridge a version of the DSpace institutional digital repository system created jointly by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard, to adapt it to local requirements and to develop its functionality as a means of preserving digital content. By the end of the year, Service staff had succeeded in procuring the necessary equipment and installing the DSpace software and were waiting for the Library to arrange for appropriate users to take part in a pilot service.

High Performance Computing Facility

44. The Computing Service continued to provide a computer room for the High Performance Computing Facility (which has a separate committee of management) as well as the services of a senior programmer with a particular interest in advanced computing systems.

Support services

Software sales

45. As in previous years, the Software Sales team supplied the University and Colleges with competitively priced software through CHEST (Combined HE Software Team) and other deals and administered University-wide support agreements for Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations. Discussions with Microsoft about Campus Agreement made little progress and so licences continued to be supplied under Select 5. The table below summarizes sales by product type for 2002-03, with 2001-02 in italics.

Software Sales	Items
Communications	427	988
Graphics and drawing, statistics	2,388	2,159
Office packages, operating systems/utilities	6,678	7,032
Programming languages, mathematics/libraries	2,518	2,444
Word processing, spreadsheets, databases	2,180	2,921
Geographic, miscellaneous	3,761	1,260
SunSpectrum/Silicon Graphics	413	482
TOTAL	18,365	17,286

Managed Cluster Service

46. The Managed Cluster Service (MCS) allows Departments and Colleges to simplify the management of their general-access computer rooms by paying a fee to the Computing Service to cover access to shared Novell Netware servers, quarterly updates to the software on the individual workstations (which consists of the standard PWF image with optional additional applications) and regular site visits to deal with problems and assess new requirements. There were 30 MCS clusters at the start of the year (16 in Colleges and 14 in Departments) with a total of 870 PCs and 130 Macintoshes; clusters at Trinity and Humanities and Social Sciences were added in December while King's, Christ's, and Lucy Cavendish Colleges joined during July 2003. By then the last sites had given up their on-site servers in favour of shared ones located in the Computing Service. From 2003-04, the MCS fee will increase smoothly with the number of workstations, unlike the old scheme of discrete price bands where adding one machine could take the cluster total over a band boundary and cause a substantial cost increase.

External hardware maintenance

47. The staff of the Engineering group repair equipment for Departments, Colleges, and individual members of the University (either as part of a full cover contract service or, more commonly, on a charged time and materials basis) and are also authorized to make warranty repairs for University customers of Apple and several PC manufacturers. The following tables summarize repair work carried out during 2002-03, with figures for 2001-02 in italics.

Equipment repaired by Type

	Contract		Non-contract
PCs	285	289	127	246
Apple Macintosh	27	28	111	92
Printers	139	96	86	101
Laptops	5	5	305	201
Other equipment	70	51	52	81
TOTAL	526	469	681	721

Equipment repaired by Institution

	Contract		Non-contract
University	273	309	426	511
Colleges	250	160	250	207
External	3		5	3
TOTAL	526	469	681	721

48. There have been over 1,300 warranty repairs since the first were made three years ago, including 150 faulty Fujitsu hard disc drive replacements in Avantek machines in six months in summer 2002. The engineers also responded to an increasing demand to recover vital user data from these and other failed hard drives and helped with the reliability and performance aspects of the Computing Service evaluation of a range of new desktop PCs. In addition, the group actively assisted the Disability Resource Centre and the Careers Service with the purchase, installation, and configuration of new equipment (and redeployment of the old) and took part in a pilot scheme to provide hardware and software support for small institutions without local support staff, including the Counselling Service and the Press and Publications Office.

Printing and Reproduction Service

49. The two Ricoh Aficio machines (one monochrome and one colour) which were installed in 2001-02 continued to work well, meeting all the needs of the Computing Service and also printing a significant amount of lecture course material for the Computer Laboratory. Total monochrome throughput for the year was 720,000 impressions for the Computing Service (compared to 780 K in 2001-02), 805 K for the Computer Laboratory (790 K) and 432 K for external customers (470 K), while the colour copy totals were: Service 11.7 K (2.5 K); Laboratory 1.0 K (1.1 K); external customers 8.5 K (5.4 K).

Photography and Illustration Service (PandIS)

50. On the photography side, although a significant amount of digital work was undertaken traditional approaches continued to predominate. The transparency service processed 5,305 rolls of E6 film (compared to 7,900 in 2001-02) and produced 4,063 flat copy, duplicate, or digital slides (7,500) while the digital scanning service handled 346 full films (780) and 2,365 mounted slides or other items (1,300). Over 400 black and white films were processed, while the colour printing service dealt with almost 5,200 films and 47,000 single item scans, producing in total 215,000 prints (176,000). At General Admission and other Congregations staff took almost 8,500 photographs (9,000) of graduands inside the Senate House, held Lawn shoots for 1,250 graduates and their families, and sold 1,285 print/degree certificate frames. On the illustration side, an ftp server was set up to allow clients to upload material for jobs and almost 1,400 posters (1,700) were produced in sizes from A4 to A0 of which 730 (850) were encapsulated. Finally, staff on both sides spent much time providing advice to customers.

Videoconferencing Service

51. Total use of the Computing Service video-conferencing facility was 236 hours from 138 bookings (compared to 146.5 from 81 in 2001-02), over two-thirds being for customers who preferred to use IP rather than ISDN, usually for cost reasons. New uses included the training of language teachers in Argentina, Pakistan, and Malaysia (for Local Examinations) and three admissions oriented talks to sixth formers at a Devon School (Downing College), while on-going uses included Ph.D. vivas, job interviews, distributed research collaboration meetings, and grant discussions with international sponsors. As the spread of video-conferencing across the University continued, staff were kept busy advising on new facilities at the Computer Laboratory and Medical Photography, and on enhancements at the Judge Institute of Management Studies and Addenbrooke's.

52. Computing Service staff again assisted with the CMI distance learning programme. The continuing two-way Materials and Architecture series ran alongside a new series of three-way conferences in the Lent and Easter Terms between Cambridge, MIT, and Singapore on Materials Science and Engineering subjects which used the facilities at the Judge Institute of Management Studies and Engineering as well as those at the Service. In January, staff were involved with the live videoconferencing relay of a CMI Prestigious Lecture given by Professor Stephen Hawking at the Judge Institute of Management Studies to audiences across the world, including a Cambridge overflow at New Hall.

Advice and consultancy

Technical User Support

53. The main duties of the Technical User Support (TUS) division are to provide support for the wide range of applications software on the various Computing Service facilities and to manage (and largely staff) the advice and consultancy, Help Desk, and TechLink services (see below). TUS also liaises closely with the User Services' Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre (LLCC) at the Sidgwick Site, which provides a specialist service for the humanities. TUS is responsible for operating the joint Service/University Library Electronic Reference Library (ERL) system, which allows users to access several specialist databases. During the year, the ERL system and its gateway server were upgraded to run under Solaris 8 and the latest versions of PsychInfo, Georef, and Medline (again the most heavily used of the databases) were installed but CINAHL (Nursing and Allied Health Literature) was withdrawn after the Medical Library cancelled its subscription.

54. During the Christmas vacation, CERT called in the Windows Support team to deal with a PC which had been hacked via SQLserver and used to launch brute force password attacks on thousands of other machines (see above). While at that stage servers were the only targets, by Easter any Windows machine, even a student's portable, seemed to be fair game and efforts were made to increase user awareness via the TUS website and TechLink seminars. The threat from viruses persisted and Computing Service staff piloted the distribution of McAfee anti-virus software via ePolicy Orchestrator as a way of quickly getting emergency signature files to desktop machines in the event of a sudden virus outbreak. Staff also put considerable effort into the client-side development of the VPDN service (see above) and set up a Microsoft Software Update Services (SUS) server to provide University-wide access to critical Windows updates without the need for each computer to download them separately from the USA.

Help Desk and TechLink

55. In November, the results of the biennial survey of Help Desk users carried out in May 2002 revealed an overall satisfaction level of 7.8 out of 10, slightly up on the equivalent 2000 figure, together with a more detailed analysis which should lead to further improvements in the service. Overall, the number of calls fell slightly, as did the proportions made by telephone (from 47% to 44%) and in person (from 26% to 23%) but, with some encouragement, the proportion made by e-mail increased (from 27% to 33%). Small falls in the proportion of calls closed within one hour (from 86.4% to 83.5%) and within 24 hours (from (91.8% to 90.4%) and in calls referred to local computer staff when Help Desk staff did not have a ready answer to a call about a non-Computing Service facility (from 2.1% to 0.9%) suggest that users are asking fewer simple questions and have become more aware of when they need to contact local support staff. The table below summarizes Help Desk calls for 2002-03 (with 2001-02 in italics):

Help Desk	Calls
University	7,265	(69.6%)	7,455	(69.8%)
Colleges	2,733	(26.2%)	2,488	(23.3%)
External	440	(4.2%)	735	(6.9%)
TOTAL	10,438	(100.0%)	10,678	(100.0%)

56. Official membership of the TechLink scheme, which provides 'fast track' support to local computer support staff, continued to increase steadily; and by the end of the year included over 340 individuals. Given the increasing tendency to ask for TechLink material to be e-mailed to a group address (e.g. computer-officers@…) there are probably many others who also benefit from the scheme, although if no one has told the Computing Service that a particular individual is now providing computer support and so qualifies for TechLink status then they may well not receive all the associated advantages. The number of Help Desk calls initiated by TechLinks went up by 15% (from 1,582 to 1,823) and the time spent by Service staff in finding the answers by 38% (from 900 to 1,250 person-hours).

57. Once again, the TechLink seminars held most weeks during term were a great success and copies of the presentations or handouts were made available on the Computing Service website for the benefit of those who were unable to attend. Service staff gave seminars which either introduced new facilities and services or aimed to bring new support staff up to speed about existing ones, while in others TechLinks described developments in their own institution. Some of the most popular seminars were given by outsiders, including the talk (with including demonstration of computer hacking) which was given by the Chief Security Officer of Microsoft UK and kept a packed audience's attention for well over two hours without a break.

Training

58. The Computing Service provides a wide range of training courses, which complement its advice and consultancy services and teach staff and students to use their computers more efficiently. The table opposite shows 2002-03 course types and attendances, with 2001-02 in italics.

Course Attendance

	Attendances
University	3,860	3,861
Colleges	770	680
External	129	227
TOTAL	4,759	4,768

Course Types

	Sessions		Attendances
Personal Computers	13	15	231	213
Unix	15	16	727	915
Networking	49	46	1,082	1,075
Spreadsheets and Databases	41	38	1,195	1,019
Word and Doc. Processing	49	48	999	1,004
Statistical Computing	19	11	260	250
Other courses	5	5	265	292
TOTAL	191	179	4,759	4,768

59. The two new 40-seater Titan Teaching Rooms were heavily used and received positive feedback from both course givers and attendees. Overall, the four Computing Service teaching rooms were used for 566 sessions in 2002-03 (including 268 in which Departments used the Service facilities to teach their own computing courses) compared to 501 in 2001-02; at this rate, a further room will be needed very soon. In October postcards advertising the courses were again sent out to all staff. Two-thirds of Michaelmas Term courses were over-subscribed and extra courses had to be scheduled, including two on Photoshop and a QuarkExpress course for editorial staff from The Cambridge Student. During the year, 397 assistant staff attended 48 Personnel Division funded course sessions (compared to 412 and 44 in 2001-02); while use of the self teaching courseware fell a little there were still many satisfied users.

60. During the year, three Windows 2000 and Active Directory courses were given to computer support staff (bringing the total taught on these courses over the last two years to 93), also two courses on PHP/MySQL for Webmasters, a repeat of the Linux System Administration course and two Netskills courses. In June, Dr Hazel's fourth course on the Exim Mail Transfer Agent attracted 83 attendees, 17 from abroad. The one-to-one course on Dragon Naturally Speaking voice software (which is particularly useful for those suffering from RSI) continued to prove very popular and will be supplemented in 2003-04 by a more traditional classroom course. In the Lent Term, Computing Service course givers benefitted greatly from a Good Practice workshop given by a trainer from the Personnel Division.

61. In October, the Computing Service, in collaboration with the Staff Development Office, piloted arrangements for staff to obtain the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), which is an internationally recognized test of basic computing skills. Twenty-two people, from seven Departments and with a wide range of job titles and previous computing experience, took part. The online teaching and certification mechanisms worked well and over half had qualified by the end of the year, although most found that it involved more work than they had expected. Although the second half of the pilot, due to start at Easter, had to be dropped when the staff member in charge of the scheme left to work for the Personnel Division, the Service is talking to the Staff Development Section about possible future ECDL programmes.

Unix Support

62. This service, which is aimed at the managers of Unix systems in individual institutions, is provided by the same group of staff who look after the managed Web server and PWF Linux (both discussed earlier). The support available includes a NFS server for downloading the latest versions of system software (which had to be moved to a larger system during summer 2002 to cope with the increasing load) and the week-long Linux System Administration course. Direct support to individual institutions, including help with the recovery of hacked machines, was also provided to many individual institutions across the University including the Library and the Management Information Services Division.

Support for purchases of personal systems

63. Computing Service staff continued to maintain regular contact with major suppliers and to use this and other sources to provide purchasing advice to institutions and individual users, either in person or via the Service's Web pages. In November, over 2,000 people attended the Service's annual IT Exhibition, which had 29 stands featuring a wide range of hardware, software, ancillary equipment, and services. At the suggestion of the Purchasing Working Group, and with the agreement of the IT Syndicate, the arrangements for providing advice were made more formal with the establishment, on a trial basis, of a Computing Commodity Group, which will be chaired by a member of the Syndicate and include representatives from the Schools and Colleges, the Service, and the Central Purchasing Office.

Directorate and liaison

Institution liaison

64. The two staff of this division (assisted where necessary by the Directorate, Network Support, and Technical User Services) consult regularly about computing matters at institution level with both senior management and computer support staff. During the year, they attended almost 200 computer committee or similar meetings at individual institutions (73 at Colleges and 123 elsewhere, compared to 60 and 140 in 2001-02), gave assistance with staff selection on 14 occasions (30), and provided an overview of Cambridge computing to 20 new staff (12).

65. Institution Liaison seems to be synonymous with meetings. Staff continued to organize the termly and well-attended general meetings at which Computing Service staff and others inform departmental and College computer support staff about recent Cambridge computing developments and helped to get the independently run Colleges IT Management Group off the ground. They also arranged and attended smaller liaison meetings at which staff from the Computing Service discussed issues of mutual interest with their opposite numbers from the Library or Management Information Services Division, continued to chair the Windows Integration Group and attended meetings of the JTMC and its Technical Sub-committee, the IT Syndicate's Technical Committee, and the Cambridge eScience Forum.

M. S. LONGAIR Chairman	P. K. FOX	M. D. SAYERS
S. J. BARTON	R. GLEN	C. A. SHORT
A. G. BUCKLEY	M. F. HEATH	R. D. H. WALKER
T. A. CARPENTER	I. LESLIE	E. R. WALLACH
D. E. DETMER	J. MILNER	S. J. YOUNG
A. L. R. FINDLAY	B. K. OMOTANI

Statistical Annex

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Cambridge University Reporter, 23 January 2004
Copyright © 2003 The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Cambridge.