A typical NS5000. Used with kind permission of the Computer History Museum

While Auspex had already been selling in North America for a few years, our NS5000 was the first true NAS device to be installed anywhere in the UK, and the third in Europe, with a couple of US corporations having previously installed one each in their European offices.

The NS5000 had many of the features of modern fileservers in terms of performance, capacity, resilience, convenience of upgrade and ease of administration. It provided a large increase in filespace compared with what we had then on our existing Amdahl mainframe. It also paved the way for centrally file-serving the Sun workstations/servers which would replace the Amdahl, and later our centrally managed PCs. Over the next twelve years we upgraded through three more Auspex fileservers until Auspex went into liquidation in 2003.

In the 1990s some engineers had left Auspex to form a new company called Network Appliance which then developed, and improved on, the Auspex offerings. After a tendering process in 2004 IT Services switched to using Network Appliance (NetApp) fileservers. Today we have on the Whiteknights Campus, a clustered set of four NetApp FAS3240 fileservers with 250TB of mirrored disk and we also have a fifth standalone NetApp FAS3140 on the Greenlands Campus.

Neal Curran with one of the University's NetApp devices

These provide commercial-strength, high performance, large capacity, highly resilient and available, secure, flexible storage and this approach to providing central storage continues to be one of the successful corner-stones of our IT strategy.

So, what are my first impressions? Number one is amazement at how such a small IT group is able to manage the scale and size of our IT operational services.  I’ve seen similarly sized IT operations run by much bigger IT sections elsewhere. The fact that we manage to run such a reliable and efficient service is a tribute to the very high calibre, expertise and commitment of our IT staff.

My second impression is that much of what ITS does is “invisible” or largely taken for granted by those on the receiving end of our services.  In many ways this is a good thing, reflecting a low failure rate and high levels of service availability.  But in other ways it reflects a lack of awareness about many of the ways in which IT is contributing to the life of the University. We are therefore working on an “Operating Plan for ITS” to communicate our service plans, priorities and objectives to the faculties and departments we serve. Improving the visibility of ITS will also help us to engage more widely in discussions on future developments across the University.  Our Plan will include some key performance measures to demonstrate the quality of what we deliver and perhaps highlight areas we need to improve.

Thirdly, it’s been encouraging to see that we have a well-designed and up to date IT infrastructure; regularly reviewed and maintained to industry standards.  The IT “plumbing” may sound a rather boring subject to mention but, as with most plumbing, everyone notices if it becomes blocked, or leaks ! For example, I have found out that some IT staff worked during their Christmas holiday to ensure that we got the London Road campus preparation completed for the Institute of Education move from Bulmershe. Also, over the last couple of weeks we’ve continued our “behind the scenes” investments, with a further spend of around £6000 to update many of our older WiFi access points on the Whiteknights campus.

I’m now looking forward to month two………

John

As these services are largely, but not entirely, labour related, it is understood that any increase is generally reflective of the annual uplift to salaries in the sector. The level of increase must also be judged against the level of administrative effort associated with the changes and on this occasion it is proposed at a 1% increase is applied to the charges listed below (some rounding has been applied).

This is in line with ISC’s agreement at its meeting of 16 June 2009 that IT Services make small percentage increases to charges.

It is therefore recommended that the following increases are applied with effect from 1 August 2012:

• Hourly rate for work outside service support agreements £ 45.50/hour (currently £45/hour)
• Hourly rate for work within service support agreements £ 38/hour (currently £37.5/hour)
• Monthly telephone line rental £ 7.60/month (currently £ 7.50/month)

Do not open it. Do not click on any links in it.

At the end of this item is an example of this email, with the link removed. Please note the poor grammar and spelling.

IT Services will never ask you to reveal your password nor would we ever ask you to update your antivirus in this manner, as this is a centrally managed service.

Should you have any concerns regarding an email you may have received or system security and anti-virus protection, contact your local IT Supporter or ITS Help on ext:6262

Example email:

Attention:Staff/Students

Please be advise that new programs and updates have been recently added
to theUniversity email system to prevent phishing and virus infected email
messages fromusers Mailboxes.Copy and paste the following link into your
browser to update your Mailbox antivirus;

Thank you.

System Administrator.
I.T.S help desk

                   © 2012 University of Reading.
Messages (including any attachments) may contain proprietary
information intended specifically for users affiliated with the
University, and are protected by law.If you are
not the intended recipient, please delete this message.Please DO NOT
REPLY to this mailbox. This mailbox is not checked for return mail.

The benefits of using Eduroam are as follows:

1) Configure and forget

2) Seamless roaming to any Eduroam subscribing site (over 575 locations in UK, plus many more in Europe, USA, Canada and AsiaPac regions).

3) Over-the-air encryption of data.

4) No bandwidth restrictions at University of Reading campuses.

5) IPv6 support at University of Reading campuses.

There are restrictions on the Guest Wifi service, such as bandwidth limits which further emphasise the recommendation to use Eduroam.

For more information on how to configure Eduroam at The University of Reading, see our documentation at http://www.reading.ac.uk/internal/its/eduroam/its-eduroam-config.aspx

For more information on Eduroam as a service:

www.eduroam.org

For a global map of participating locations:

http://www.eduroamus.org/eduroam_international_map

If people are getting a white page with a “Microsoft VBScript runtime” error immediately after they log in, a quick refresh should sort it.

 If they are getting a “Wrong User ID or Password” sort of error (can’t remember the exact wording) after logging in, then call me on x7452.

John says: “I’m excited to be working for the University of Reading and looking forward to meeting as many colleagues as possible over the next few weeks. It’s a privilege to be working for such a highly-regarded department as IT Services, and I’ve been very impressed by the commitment and professionalism of all the staff I’ve met in my first week here. I know we have some challenges ahead of us in 2012, but also some real opportunities for enhancing the way in which IT services are delivered across the University. I will also publish regular updates on my work and plans using this news feed”

John lives in Reading, has two grown-up sons and is a keen angler (when the weather is decent!) He’s also involved in a local church and confesses to being an occasional Tottenham supporter (with apologies to all Reading fans).

His background includes a number of senior IT management roles within the public sector, including Head of IT for Nottingham City Council, and Head of Projects and Resources for Nottinghamshire County Council. Before joining us he worked as a Programme Manager for the National Policing Improvement Agency.

Where “home use” of software is granted under a licence agreement:

• this can only be used on personally owned equipment.
• If equipment is loaned or supplied to you by an employer and your employer is not the University of Reading, then “home use” rights will not apply on this equipment.
• University licensed software must not be installed on this equipment.

Academic licences also have restrictions on the applications and use of software:

• Any data that is manipulated by or created using academic licensed software cannot be used by you or provided to external companies for commercial gain.

Full details of software licences are available on our website at:

http://www.reading.ac.uk/closed/its/docs/docs–swtable.aspx

All pages are in the process of being updated to include the change in advice above.

This has caused problems for a large number of users and for this we apologise. We hope the information below illustrates the problems that we have faced and the fix.

IT Services first received warning notices about the problem on Wednesday 16 November at about 19:00, from our automatic monitoring services. The problems manifested themselves as high CPU load due to the Blackboard Java process and this in turn caused the slowness experienced due to a lack of system resources. These problems were dealt with by IT Services staff remotely and appeared to be fixed by a system restart.

The problems recurred throughout Thursday and continued despite system restarts around lunchtime. During this time IT Services had contacted the vendors who provided advice on some systems settings to change and a patch to apply to the system. These were implemented out of office hours between 1700 and 1800. Once these had been applied the system CPU load was much reduced, generally operating at around 50-60%, which was in fact substantially lower than typical load seen over the previous few weeks.

Today, Friday 18 November, we have been able to investigate what caused this sudden spike in load, and appear to have tracked it down to a sudden increase in the University’s Google-Mini search appliance scanning which started at about 1420 on the Wednesday. This increased the load on Blackboard that appeared to trigger a bug, which the subsequent patch fixed. Scanning of the Blackboard system from the Google-Mini appliance has now been halted and IT Services are continuing to monitor the Blackboard system load. We are continuing to investigate why there was a sudden increase in scanning on Wednesday.

If you continue to have problems with Blackboard, please keep us notified via its-help@reading.ac.uk or by phoning ext 6262

An interesting set of questions came round via the UCISA (Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association) Windows mail list last week which this put us to thinking about what we offer for Student IT Training here at the University and so here are the questions with our answers.

Q: How you provide student IT Training, is this on a one to one basis or do you run scheduled or drop-in sessions?

A: We provide both scheduled and drop-in sessions.

Q: How do you deliver the sessions, work from on-line resources or paper based resources, etc?

A: We work from paper based resources although these are also available online on our website as pdfs.

Q: How often do you offer the sessions?

A: We offer betwen 5-6 scheduled sessions a week and 3 drop-in sesions a week during term-time.

Q: What type of sessions do you offer, which applications, etc?

A: We offer sessions on the main Office applications, i.e. Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access, and at different levels (essential/basic, intermediate and advanced). We also offer sessions on Using the Office Drawing Tools and Creating a Personal Web Page using Word.

Q: How do you go about overcoming obstacles such as users never having used a computer before or not getting anyone turning up at the sessions?

A: For users who have never used a computer before, we would probably recommend coming to a drop-in session though one of the Essential classes might also be manageable. This term we introduced an online course booking form and this has been very well used, but we still find that many students don’t turn up on the day even with email reminders (the day before) and the possibility of cancelling.

Q: Any suggestions to ensure the success of the sessions and what to avoid to stop failure of the sessions?

A: Be prepared to adapt the materials to the trainees and time/network constraints. Have a plan B even if this may be abandoning the class if the network is down!

For more information on IT Training at the University of Reading, please see www.reading.ac.uk/its/training

For more information on UCISA, please see their website www.ucisa.ac.uk