The Information Technology Syndicate advises the Council and the General Board on all matters concerned with the use of IT within the University and, through members nominated by the Bursars' Committee and the Senior Tutors' Committee, it similarly advises the Colleges. Liaison is maintained with other major IT providers in the University through the Director of the Management Information Services Division (MISD), the Chairman of the Joint Telecommunications Management Committee (JTMC), and the Director of the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET). The Syndicate has representatives from the staff of the University Computing Service and from the student body. In addition to its general role in advising the University, the Syndicate oversees the work of the University Computing Service.
The body of this report consists of: an executive summary giving the main headlines of note within the Report, a section describing the main items of policy discussed by the Syndicate during 2004-05, a section detailing future projects and strategy for the Computing Service and highlighting some of its activities over the past year, and a short glossary listing some of the jargon and terminology used within the report. This is followed by a statistical annex giving details of the use made by the University of the main facilities and services provided by the Computing Service. A more detailed breakdown of these statistics is available on the World Wide Web at http://cam.ac.uk/cs/itsyndicate/annrep/stats04.05.pdf.
Following the discussions of last year, when the need for the Information Technology Syndicate to have a broader remit and reporting structure was recognized, extensive consultation with the General Board, the Council, and the Information Strategy Group led to a revised set of regulations for the IT Syndicate in Ordinances being graced towards the end of the academical year. These allow for the Syndicate to be responsible to both the Council and the General Board, and for there to be provision for broader membership of the Syndicate from across both the academic and administrative areas of the University, as well as the Colleges. Along with these changes in representation came a broadening in the scope of the duties of the Syndicate, which now makes rules for the regulation and security of the use of Information Technology facilities across the University in general, rather than just those specifically provided by the University Computing Service. This also resulted in a consequential change to the existing Rules published by the Syndicate.
The Syndicate continues to take a broad interest in the development of GRID technology throughout the University. GRID technology, allows for the sharing of spare computing resources within a collaborative community of peer computing systems. The Computing Service developments to introduce a GRID infrastructure component into its Personal Workstation Facility were encouraged, and the Director of the Cambridge eScience Centre was invited to give a presentation to the Syndicate on progress made by his team in GRID computing within the University. Collaboration between the eScience Centre and the Computing Service was encouraged.
The publication of the First Joint Report of the Council and the General Board on a new pay and grading structure for non-clinical staff resulted in a number of discussions by the Syndicate considering how this might have an impact on IT-related jobs throughout the University. There was general concern, supported by some anecdotal evidence, that the proposed job evaluation methodology, HERA, had a tendency to under-value IT support roles relative to other support or administrative roles within higher education institutions. The Syndicate believed it was important for senior IT staff within the University to be closely involved in the evaluation process, to ensure that the fair interpretation of job function was achieved.
The University Computing Service's financial plan for the 2004 Planning Enquiry was approved by the Syndicate. This included provision for a controlled reduction in the Service's financial reserves to £368,000 in 2008-09; reserves would then be maintained at that level for contingencies. The plan provided for the stable provision of services to the University, broadly the same as those provided at present, but with an increase in charges levied on cost recovery services to meet the additional overhead costs imposed on resources supporting these activities. Following submission of the plan, the Service was further encouraged to request additional resources to support the use of Information Technology to assist people with disabilities within the University and to work closely with the Disabilities Support Centre in this area. These resources were subsequently approved, and this initiative will be put into place during 2005-06.
The Computing Service's plans for four project bids under the SRIF 3 and Project Capital 4 initiatives were approved and were ultimately successful. These will provide for a £1m upgrade to the CUDN during 2007-08, a £200,000 Public Workstation and Managed Cluster infrastructure upgrade during 2006-08, a £120,000 replacement programme for the central PWF workstations during 2006-08, and a £100,000 upgrade to the University's Hermes electronic mail system during the summer of 2006. The Syndicate noted that the Computing Service's five-year forward planning for the Planning Enquiry 2004 had relied heavily on achieving success with these bids.
Following the increase in the apparent income of the University as a result of the inclusion of UCLES's accounts with those of the rest of the University, the annual JANET network charge imposed on the University for 2005-06 increased by 30% to £202,000. If not offset by central funds, this would lead to a significant increase in data traffic costs for Departments and Colleges in the next academical year, a situation which it was recognized would worsen in future years when the accounts of the Press and certain other trusts are also included.
The Syndicate continued to take a keen interest in the University's project to replace the existing analogue telephone system with a 'Voice over IP' data-network-based replacement. Cross-representation on the IT Syndicate and the Joint Telecommunications Management Committee, and a strong leading interest from the Computing Service's new Director, Ian Lewis, has led to increasing involvement by the Computing Service in this project, and Dr Lewis is now the official project sponsor for the work.
National and international collaborations and projects between academics often need to have an independent presence on the internet. However, the technicalities of setting up and maintaining the mechanisms to provide for an independent 'domain name' require resources that are not often present amongst the original collaborators. The Syndicate had been reluctant to commit Computing Service resources to support what effectively were external groups of users. However, following strong interest in this at senior levels within the University and the presentation of a proposal for a manageable charged service from the Service, it was agreed to offer the management of such domains as a facility provided to the University. Requests for such domains would be individually approved by the Syndicate itself.
As a result of a huge increase in the number of security breaches on computers within the University this year, the Computing Service had put forward a proposal to impose a more restrictive network filtering regime at the gateway to the 'outside world', as well as between institutions within the University, to 'firewall' the network against hostile traffic. The Syndicate, whilst sympathizing with the Service's problem, felt that such a block could have significant consequences within the University and so extensive consultation should be undertaken by the Computing Service before it proceeded any further with such a proposal.
Following an initiative from the Board of Graduate Studies, with the support of the Computing Service, the question of conducting Ph.D. and other viva voce examinations by video-conference, where face-to-face meetings were impracticable, was considered by the Syndicate. Many other universities allow for such a contingency, and the Syndicate could see no technical reasons why this should not occur at Cambridge, provided adequate facilities were available at both sites. It therefore supported the proposal, which is to be taken forward by the Board of Graduate Studies.
During the year, Professor Short was replaced by Dr Penz as the School of Arts and Humanities representative, and Mr Ayers replaced Mr Buckley as the student representative on the Syndicate. The new Director of the Computing Service, Dr Lewis, joined following the retirement of Dr Sayers in December 2004, and Dr Norman, the Director of CARET, was also co-opted onto the Syndicate. Finally, during this summer, after many years of dedication to Syndicate business, Professor Longair retired as its chairman, to take sabbatical leave. Professor Jean-Pierre Hansen has succeeded him as chairman.
This section summarizes the support provided by the University Computing Service in 2004-05 and the significant developments in facilities and services during that academical year. At the beginning, is a discussion of the strategic issues requiring the Service's attention and a review of the planned significant initiatives for 2005-06.
The following issues are receiving attention from the UCS Senior Management Team, and while substantive action will be taken during 2005-06, it is expected that the strategic direction established will be continued into subsequent years. It is the Service's goal to set a foundation in these areas that will position it well for continued successful IT support across the University into the future.
The UCS has the primary responsibility for the effective provision of IT support across the University, but the IT support at Cambridge is unusual as it is fragmented into many contributory groups totalling approximately 500 IT officers. The current pay and grading exercise crosses the organizational divisions and it is important that we have a process that is fair and consistent. The expectation is that after the matching and scoring becomes a distant memory, computing positions will be consistently referred to as (for example) 'IT Officer Grade 5' or 'IT Officer Grade 8' where the number is directly comparable to the grade of staff in any other role in the University, rather than the current exclusive titles such as 'Senior Computer Officer'. The use of the 'IT Officer' prefix is intended to be applicable across the University to all information technology related roles, e.g. including the various networking and systems development disciplines. The UCS is making an effort to be at the forefront of the pay and grading process given the strategic importance to the diverse and distributed computing staff who serve the University.
A degree of success has been achieved in effectively mapping the Service's support for IT to the devolved organizational structure of the University, maintaining the balance between prescribed common infrastructure and the delegated local autonomy necessary for the productive working of the many institutions. In particular the data network is fast, robust, and transparently facilitates collaboration between groups without being considered as a possible impediment. The Service's common authentication framework (called Raven) has become established with thousands of users in 2004-05, again facilitating collaboration which otherwise would have been less productive. The e-mail environment is to a degree common, with spam and virus filtering taking place centrally in the UCS serving multiple satellite e-mail systems. The telephone system replacement presents an opportunity to combine the current voice networks and data networks into one. The new University Directory based on LDAP is designed as a common tool to be used across all institutions, having been designed to support federated administration of user and institution data and provide programmatic access to the directory data from institutional systems. As the Service moves into 2005-06 it will seek opportunities to provide further common infrastructure across the University.
Many if not most IT officers are scattered in small groups across the University. The Computing Service is proceeding on the basis that this 'federated' support model is actually the best one for the University, trading the proximity of the support staff to the recipient academic users with the effort needed for central co-ordination to maintain consistency in the IT systems. With this in mind, the Service is actively seeking to implement tools and processes which assist in the effective coordination of all IT staff in the context of that federated model. Where today the primary means of co-ordination is via mailing lists and numerous seminars, the Service is expecting to implement websites, bulletin-boards, and other collaboration tools specifically aimed at the IT officer population of the University. In addition to technical support within that population, there will be advantages in the fair and consistent application of pay and grading, personal development, and career management.
Roger Stratford, Head of Institution Liaison in the UCS, will be retiring in September 2005. Further senior staff will be retiring within the next two years and each of these individuals embodies a huge amount of knowledge and experience of not only the technology environment but also the University. In aggregate they represent a significant proportion of the experience within the Senior Management of IT at the University. Their expertise is realistically irreplaceable and considerable work will be needed to plan around their departure.
A programme is underway within the UCS to create a database of the services provided, access to which will be via an easy-to-use web-based application. The development process is providing useful side-effects, including the consideration of the most appropriate information that should be presented for every service. This would include not only a description of the service, but how to use it, how to obtain it, how to get support for it, and how any financial charging might work. The data-driven tool will be connected to a variety of other areas within the Computing Service website so that this consistent information is made pervasive throughout the site. Within the UCS the data will be used to connect other internal information, such as the accumulation of our resources and costs in production of the service, and our technical documentation.
The new University Directory is providing a definitive directory structure for the institutions that receive IT services from the UCS. This data is being used within the UCS to create a data strategy that has 'institutional recipient' as a more pervasive dimension of the data recorded and discussed within the UCS. The goal is to support a more consistent query across the UCS by institution, e.g. how many helpdesk calls were received from a given institution, what their network usage has been, how much e-mail traffic was exchanged. This data is currently collected but not always easy to report upon by receiving institution, and a sound data strategy should make that straightforward.
CARET is pursuing a variety of technologies to assist teaching in the University, including the support of online course materials, online coursework submission, course calendaring, and the use of computer-delivered tools to add insight to particular courses. An issue under consideration is whether the University Computing Service should provide more resources for the production, implementation, and support of some of the infrastructure. A candidate in 2005-06 for greater co-operation of the UCS with CARET would be the virtual learning environment 'Sakai'.
It may not be obvious to those with an easy familiarity with the variety of lookup tools available online that there is no common directory of staff and students within the University. Currently e-mail addresses are found by querying the pertinent e-mail system, phone numbers are found in either the printed directory or on departmental websites, and office locations and role titles are not generally available. The lack of a common directory causes deeper issues with collaboration in the University and beyond, as, in addition to contact details being hard to find, authenticated access to common systems is difficult to provide, and there is no common base for person-related links to research and teaching materials. The UCS seeks to address these issues with a web-based University Directory, providing contact details of colleagues and institutions, telephone administration, e-mail address administration, user authentication, and the ability to link to other web-based information. The data will be accessible to other systems around the University in an open format, and management of the data will be federated to institution and system administrators. Where appropriate, users will be able to edit their own details.
The UCS has a wireless implementation currently in pilot, generally referred to as the 'Secure Wireless Pilot'. This solution establishes an encrypted session between the user laptop and the CUDN, requiring some laptop configuration and the use of a userID and PIN especially for the wireless connection. A complementary solution will also be implemented requiring no configuration on the laptop (beyond entry of the normal pair of network parameters: network name and WEP key), which will constrain access to a web-based authentication panel before allowing general access to the CUDN. Authentication for University members will be provided via Raven, removing the need for a special userID and PIN, and consideration will be made for accommodating non-University members in a structured way. The service will initially be deployed in some public areas, with installation in Departments or Colleges dependent upon their requirements.
The current telephone system in the University has provided sterling service since the mid-1980s, supporting 15,000 handsets, and it is expected that it will be necessary to migrate off that system in 2007-08. The goal is to implement an open-architecture system supporting existing analogue telephones, new high-function digital handsets, inexpensive generic digital handsets, computer-based telephone software, and connectivity of mobile phones as extensions. The digital telephone traffic will be flowing on the CUDN rather than the current separate telephone network, enabling us to reduce our investment in the latter, and digital calls should be at no cost per-call both within and outside of the University. Rather than a sudden-death cutover, there will be a planned orderly migration from the current phone system, and to that end an initial digital service will be introduced in 2005-06.
The UCS Public Workstation Facility currently provides 1,400 desktop PCs in approximately 50 clusters around the University, and has been very successful in delivering a productive computing environment with the necessary robustness and security to undergraduates and postgraduates. These general access machines have to cope with the ad hoc behaviour of a diverse population of users accessing an internet awash with viruses, spyware, Trojans, and other poisonous objects. The machines are updated constantly and their systems completely rebuilt every vacation, with all 1,400 machines able to be re-built in six hours. The current implementation has the storage and printing capabilities of the PWF accessible only from the PWF workstations. The services of the PWF will be devolved into these separate components in 2005-06 such that the storage and (possibly) printing can be accessed from any general purpose workstation.
During the year, the Cambridge Emergency Response Team recorded the following computer security-related incidents in the Cambridge internet domain: 380,355 hostile probes into the cam domain (more than 1,000 per day), 2,309 compromised machines in the cam domain (more than six a day), and handled 37 complaints of copyright infringement.
The number of hostile probes into the cam domain has dropped dramatically during the year, from a maximum of over 70,000 per month to around 16,000. This may possibly be the result of machines on the internet being found and cleaned more expediently, or may be the result of attackers turning their attention to probing explicitly for software where a recent vulnerability has been announced. The time gap between a vulnerability announcement and a released exploit continues to shrink.
Almost all the compromised machines have been Microsoft Windows boxes, with a small number of Linux and MacOS X systems. With the increasing payload complexity of network worms and viruses it has become apparent that there is essentially no difference between a machine that has succumbed to one of these and a machine that has been directly attacked.
Constant vigilance is essential to maintain the security of the University, and the daily searching of traffic logs is a necessity: looking at the traffic patterns involving a known compromised machine, looking for similar patterns to and from other Cambridge systems that might indicate further compromises, and monitoring traffic to and from remote machines 'owned' by hackers. The Service believes that seven-day-a-week monitoring of network traffic is essential.
The University-wide web authentication system, 'Raven', goes from strength to strength and is now a major component of the University's new student information system, CamSIS. All undergraduates will use Raven to authenticate CamSIS, which they will have to do to register for examinations or check examination registrations made by a third party. Significant effort and development work has gone into ensuring the compatibility of the two systems.
The Raven system is now also in use at the University Library to authenticate access to a wide variety of online academic journals. These journals have been licensed for Cambridge use and the Raven-authenticated proxy provides a simple mechanism to restrict access to the journals to Cambridge users.
Over the past year a huge development effort has gone into the development of a University Directory Service. This is intended to be a single point of contact for a very large amount of user and institutional data, including e-mail addresses and telephone numbers. Access to this data over the web is controlled by Raven authentication and provides mechanisms for users to update and add to their entries, or to withdraw from the system altogether. Access is also available to systems on the University network via a specialist protocol, LDAP, to provide this information to mail clients, providing a university-wide e-mail address book for the first time.
The CMI-sponsored DSpace@Cambridge project has continued through the year. The facility is now the largest DSpace repository in the world with over 100,000 items stored within it.
The total number of institutions using the PWF Managed Cluster Service has been essentially constant over the year, although there have been a number of changes. As of July 2005, there were clusters in 20 Colleges and 16 Departments, and the overall number of PWF stations of all types was nearly 1,600, including 140 administrative stations. Of the 1,600, 190 were Macintoshes and the remainder PCs. The PWF Linux option was provided for about 560 dual-booted stations at 11 institutions as well as the Computing Service facilities themselves.
Use of the new 2.5TB PWF user file-store, brought into service in April 2004, has doubled over the year to about 600 GB of user data in over 12.5 million files. The default user space limit was raised to 250MB in October 2004, larger limits being agreed on special application.
A number of improvements to the PWF Macintosh service were made over the past year. The operating system was upgraded to OS X 10.3, with corresponding upgrades to applications. The imaging software was also upgraded, simplifying the roll-out task for IT Officers at Managed Cluster Sites, and also enabling remote imaging to be performed. Server upgrades also improved the efficiency of imaging.
The PWF and Managed Cluster PCs ran Windows XP Pro and, where opted for, SuSE Linux 9.2 throughout the year. Across the PWF as a whole there were some 140 printers and over 4.8 million sides of paper were printed.
The University's central e-mail routing system (PPswitch) handled 400 million messages last year and blocked approximately 75% of them that were definitely identified as 'spam'. The remaining 25% were tagged to indicate the likelihood that they were spam, permitting users to set their own thresholds for spam filtering. The same system stripped out viruses from messages or rejected messages that were entirely viruses. Over 1.5 million viruses were removed by this system, providing another line of defence for the vulnerable PCs in the University. Of the 80 institutions of the University who run their own e-mail systems, 67 actually run them behind PPswitch, relying on this facility for the spam and virus filtering.
The central e-mail store system, Hermes, handled the e-mail for over 32,000 users, providing robust and secure storage for more than 60 million messages, using more than 5TB of disc (including replicas). It provides secure access to e-mail both within the University and for those at home or travelling. All the standard e-mail clients are supported and over 10,000 distinct users per day access the system this way. For users with access to only a browser, Hermes provides its own web interface, generally regarded as the one of the most efficient webmail systems in existence, supporting over 20,000 distinct users per day.
The University's Web search engine now has two faces: one for internal users and one for external. The internal search engine provides access to those documents restricted to Cambridge clients in addition to the publicly visible ones. The external face provides access only to the public ones. In addition the UCS has bought a new licence, valid for the next four years, which will allow it to expand the search engine beyond its current restrictive licence limit of 500,000 documents.
The membership of the TechLink scheme has been stable for several years now at around 350 IT support staff throughout the University and its Colleges.
The annual seminar programme organized by the UCS included talks given by members of the Computing Service, members of the TechLink scheme itself, and speakers from the IT industry. The full programme of 17 talks covered such diverse topics as 'Voice recognition software: what TechLinks ought to know', 'An overview of the central mail services', 'IP convergence: what does it offer?', 'Opportunities for remote access to Cambridge resources', 'When is a virus not a virus?', 'My machine couldn't possibly be hacked!', and 'Building access control systems: local experiences'.
In early June, speakers from Apple Computer Inc presented a successful extended seminar on 'Tiger (OS X 10.4) Technology' to a large audience composed mainly of TechLink members.
As usual the demand for IT training was highest in the Michaelmas Term with over 25% of scheduled courses being oversubscribed. The most popular topics were Web page authoring, EndNote, Photoshop, SPSS, Unix, and the Word course on 'Mastering dissertations, theses, and books'. Six new courses were offered during the year, including 'QuarkXpress Further Use' and 'XML Technology Overview' which attracted large numbers.
A two-day Windows System Administration course, which had been developed over the previous year, was presented for the first time in September. The feedback from those who attended was very positive, and accordingly the course was repeated in April. Following a very successful five-day Advanced System Administrator course for Mac OS X 10.3 Server, given by an external Apple trainer, Service staff developed an in-house Macintosh OS X Server System Administration course which was once again enthusiastically received by other IT officers who attended it. Such advanced in-house courses are of significant benefit to the University, as commercial courses are extremely expensive to attend, prohibitively so for some IT support staff.
How to achieve more awareness of the course programmes provided is a recurring theme, and during the year ways were considered to attract students more effectively, resulting in a campaign in which four Colleges were targeted in various ways. The number of bookings from undergraduates did increase by 40% but this is still only a relatively low 8% of the total. Once again a publicity postcard is being sent to everyone on the University payroll, having proved to be an excellent way of advertising our courses to staff over the last few years.
The training team continued to provide bespoke courses in addition to the advertised programme. Sessions on Excel and Access were delivered at the Clinical School to 19 anaesthetists, there was some training given in Microsoft Outlook for UAS staff, and a session on general IT skills was presented to the Estate Management and Building Service (EMBS) management in December. The team also delivers a regular programme of courses throughout the year for the Personnel Division's Staff Development Programme.
For the first time, distribution of the passwords for undergraduate accounts was done online. This followed the previous year's trial for postgraduates. By the first day of lectures, 99% of undergraduates had collected their passwords, and feedback from College offices has been very positive.
Throughout the year, work towards the launch of CamSIS has kept the Service's User Administration team busy; there has been a great deal of behind the scenes work to deal with the change of datafeed and this continues. Members of the Service have served on both the CamSIS Steering Group and the Technical Working Group.
In addition to the usual documentation of Computing Service systems and services, the Service also released the 'Computing Service A-Z of Jargon' facility giving straightforward explanations of the sometimes baffling terminology used in IT. This document can be found online at http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/jargon.html.
Security issues have dominated the work of the team over the past year. Once again a CD was produced to enable new students and others to secure a PC and install anti-virus software prior to connection to the University network. A current version is maintained as an ISO CD image for download from the PC Support web pages.
There was a spate of hacking early in 2005 targeted primarily at machines running Microsoft Windows. Members of the PC Support team have investigated an exceptional number of incidents around the University during the year, including some within the CS. This has given the team the chance to update their skills in response to the increasingly challenging security environment, particularly since several of these incidents involved the use of so-called 'stealthed kits', which have necessitated the development of new tools and procedures. The fruit of this work has been disseminated via the TechLink scheme and documentation. Unfortunately, a disproportionate amount of time is spent on supporting a small number of institutions who have no IT support provision locally. Frequently the PC Support team is called in after a security incident where it is then discovered that the machines have not been properly maintained.
Meetings have begun with the Academic Division, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, and others, in order to prepare the ground for installing the systems needed for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008. The PC Support team will undertake technical support for this project. The intention is to build on the pre-existing structure and useful experience of the previous RAE to provide some continuity.
The Hardware support team continues to repair desktop computers for staff and students of the University, but laptops are becoming an ever-increasing proportion of the work. Repair work has also branched out to cover certain brands of printer, particularly larger models, and the team were able to identify the cause of a common problem with the network cards supplied with a well-known range of printers, many of which are in use in the University and Colleges, and were thus able to initiate a solution to the problem.
Data recovery continues to be a popular value-added service for the team, allowing for the restoration of vital data from failed discs, and also new devices such as USB memory sticks, for members of the University. The team has recently invested in new state-of-the-art equipment which enables connection to most major makes of hard disc, providing for more complete data recovery.
The very successful photographic exhibitions, 'Double Exposure', which highlight creative photographic work produced by members of the University in collaboration with the Photographic and Illustration Service team within the Computing Service, continued for a second year in PandIS's upgraded corridor exhibition space. This year's exhibitions were: Old as the hills - the fossils of the Builth Inlier (Dr Joseph Botting, Earth Sciences), The mundane and the monumental (Kay Goodridge, artist in residence, Addenbrooke's Hospital), and Images of the Arctic and Antarctic (Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute).
The Computing Service's Video-conferencing Suite is able to deliver large financial savings to the University when used to hold meetings and deliver seminars remotely rather than travelling to distant venues. Enhancing publicity is therefore a primary objective of the video-conferencing team and efforts are being made to expand the use of the service.
Over the year, over 70 sessions were booked, providing over 100 hours of video-conferencing, to 20 different countries, covering every continent except Antarctica.
The Service's video-conferencing staff are increasingly called upon to provide support to Departments using their own equipment, including the Judge Business School, Strangeways Laboratory, the Department of Engineering, and Homerton College. They also continue to represent the University on the East Anglian Video-conferencing Forum, a body formed to provide video-conferencing support within the health services across the region.
A secure pilot wireless service was introduced. This uses the facilities of the pilot Virtual Private Data Network (VPDN) service, also used for secure remote internet access, to provide an encrypted tunnel over the wireless medium. However, the VPDN client installation is cumbersome and, on some systems, difficult to install and commission. For this reason, the service has not been upgraded from 'pilot' status. Plans are in hand both to extend the service and to provide a more convenient alternative.
Use of the VPDN service itself has increased substantially over the year from 850 sessions/month in June 04 to 1,450 in October 04 and 2,450 in June 05. CUDN dialup (Magpie) sessions have declined by about 10% over the year and are currently about 50,000 sessions/month. No doubt more users are switching to VPDN having installed a broadband connection. However, comparison is not straightforward because on broadband there is usually no incentive to minimize session (connect) time.
Thirteen additional cables were installed to ease congested routes. Six more GBN nodes or mini-nodes were located at University and College sites. On completion of building works at Hughes Hall/Fenner's and at Magdalene College's Chesterton Road hostel, the diverted GBN infrastructure was reinstalled.
The GBN node and associated cables at 17-19 Brookside were removed and replacement cables were installed through new duct route avoiding the property. A permanent route diversion was made at New Hall to avoid building works.
A considerable number of circuits were installed for the University Telephone Network to enable BT circuits to be given up with a significant cost-saving to the University Telephone Service's accounts and an improvement in reliability.
The commissioning of 10 Gbps links across the GBN for the CUDN was completed so that each area switch-router has redundant links to the New Museums Site core. A programme of regular testing of the fall-back arrangements has been put in place.
The contract with NTL for EastNet's telecommunication services was novated to UKERNA in December; the reliability of the service is unaltered. The EastNet Consortium continues to meeting to maintain liaison between the higher education institutions in the East of England.
The Computing Service has started a review of the long-term future of the Central Unix Service. This system has been running since 1991 in various incarnations and now that desktop computing is so much more prevalent the time has come to consider plans for its future. The CUS will continue to be run for at least the next two or three years but comments and opinions are actively being solicited from CUS users to the address cus-futures@ucs.cam.ac.uk concerning what should happen subsequently.
The departmental Safety Committee, consisting of representatives from all the major sections of the Service and chaired by the Deputy Director, met four times during the year. The usual annual departmental safety inspections were completed in the Michaelmas Term, as well as a more extensive formal audit of the Service's procedures by the Health and Safety Division in the new year. A small number of changes to existing practice were recommended, but on the whole the Service received an excellent report. A full programme of staff training and risk assessments was completed during the year. A more detailed Health and Safety report can be found on the web at http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/hs/.
During the year two long-serving members of the Service retired. In September 2004 John Wheeler, one of the Service's Hardware Support team, retired after 33 years of service as an engineer. Following his retirement, the opportunity was taken to re-organize the team, upgrading two posts from Technician to Computer Officer, whilst suppressing the vacated post.
At the end of December, Mike Sayers retired after almost twenty years with the Computing Service, the last ten of which had been spent as its Director. Following his retirement, and a brief period during which the Computing Service was under the acting Directorship of Steve Kearsey, the Deputy Director, the University was successful in recruiting Mike's replacement, Dr Ian Lewis, who took up the position of Director in April 2005.
Various members of the Computing Service continue to contribute to the IT forum at national level.
The deputy head of the Technical Support Division continued to contribute as a member of the UCISA's Advisory Services Working Group, and the Network Support Manager replaced the Head of the Network Division on UCISA's Networking Group, becoming the secretary of the group.
During the year the Deputy Director became the chairman of the newly formed JISC Mirror Steering Group, which oversees operational policy for the JISC national software mirror site.
The following section is a short glossary of some technical terms used in this Report. For additional guidance please see http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/jargon.html.
CARET Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies.
CamSIS Cambridge Student Information System. The central system holding key student data with connections to many satellite computer systems.
CERT Cambridge Emergency Response Team within the UCS that responds to the constant hacking attempts and virus attacks that afflict the network.
CUDN Cambridge University Data Network. The pervasive data network that connects all the Departments and Colleges together, and to the internet.
eScience The Cambridge eScience Centre has a remit from the DTI to promote grid computing research in East Anglia.
Firewall Computer placed at the centre of a data network to prevent certain types of traffic. Would be used to implement Port Blocking (see below).
GRID The use of networks of general-purpose computers (typically PCs) to provide parallel high-performance computing.
Hermes Central e-mail service.
ISO CD A standard format for computer disks (CD-ROMs) suitable for distributing virus protection updates (for example) to all students.
IT Information Technology.
JANET Joint Academic Network. High-speed internet backbone in the UK provided by the government to which the University connects.
JTMC Joint Telecommunications Management Committee. Oversees the Telecommunications Office which runs the voice infrastructure.
LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. The technology that underlies the new University Directory. Has the advantage of direct access by e-mail clients to complete e-mail addresses for staff.
Managed Cluster See PWF.
Managed Domains The support within the University Computing Service for website names such as http://talk.cam.ac.uk, i.e. one-level below the University's .cam.ac.uk name.
MISD Management Information Services Division. Provides IT support to the Unified Administrative Service.
Port Blocking Blocking within the central data network equipment of certain types of traffic, in an attempt to reduce the propagation capabilities of computer viruses and external hacking attempts.
PWF Personal Workstation Facility. PC's provided in clusters in general access areas within Departments and Colleges typically for undergraduate use.
Raven Strategic personal authentication system used to protect websites and web-delivered applications such as CamSIS within the University.
Spam Unsolicited bulk e-mail or junk mail.
TB Abbreviation of Terabyte. A significant quantity of computer storage.
VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol. Free voice calls established using internet-connected devices, e.g. a PC running Skype, or a new handset expected to replace the current central phone system.
Web Search Engine The Cambridge tool placed behind the 'search' button on the website for which the 'Infoseek' free-text search product is used, similar to Google.
Wireless The ability to connect to the internet and the CUDN (see above) from a PC without physical cabling - using radio equipment instead.
XML A generic computer language used to annotate data, e.g. reference data for storage in a library repository.
| J.-P. HANSEN Chairman | P. K. FOX | J. R. NORMAN |
| S. J. BARTON | R. C. GLEN | B. K. OMOTANI |
| D. J. BATES | M. F. HEATH | F. A. PENZ |
| J. S. BELL | I. J. LEWIS | N. S. SMITH |
| T. A. CARPENTER | M. R. JONES | R. D. H. WALKER |
| A. L. R. FINDLAY | J. K. MILNER | E. R. WALLACH |
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