Meeting Notes for 19 December 2007

Present: Eric, Mihael, Liz, Tom L., Tom J.
Absent: Bob, Mike W. Randy, Dan K., K. Whelan, Joao

New data server

Mihael has this up and running. Nick has done a lot of testing on wwww11 to see if everything is working. He had some minor problems files that had been uploaded, but they were tiff and had the wrong extensions (png) so they did not display.

Mihael is going to work on getting www18 running with refactored code. The server has 2 Terabyes of data.

Reverse proxy problem with port 443.

Tom Jordan had a problem testing on www13 yesterday. He kept going to www11 because of a reverse proxy.

Currently: www13.i2u2.org/elab/cosmic/ - takes user to code on port 80 that has a hardcoded link to www11

www13.i2u2.org:8080/elab/cosmic/home.jsp - takes user to code on port 8080 that uses https://www13.i2u2.org:443 This code uses the properties file to create the link.

www13.i2u2.org:8080/elab/cosmic/teacher.jsp - takes user to https://www13.i2u2.org:443/elab/cosmic/login.jsp?prevPage=/cosmic/teacher.jsp

Currently Eric has:

proxy4forums.conf - proxy for /elab/ligo/ from www13:8080
                      proxy for /elab/cosmic from www11:8080
                      proxy for /elab/cms from www12:9080
                      everything else except /tla  (Bluestone)
                       is proxied from i2u2.spy-hill.net
                       

During the meeting, he changed it to go to:
proxy4tomcat.conf - www13:443 (https) is just serving www13:8080

This improved things, but it retains the https: for all subsequent pages.

We decided:

• www13 will not have a secure server; we have 90% confidence in the reverse proxy concept (13 is a mixture of code that people are testing; it will be replaced soon by the refactored code.)
• We can use www12 to test proxies before we deploy it to production. Apache server will be on port 80.

Guest login Proposal

Eric proposes getting rid of the link for the guest user to log in and putting text to instructions for the user to login as user name "guest" and password "guest". Liz noted that logging in now with guest/guest works just as the link does so the only thing that needs changing is adding the text and getting rid of the link. Action: Liz will put this into Bugzilla. This should be in the refactored version.

Teacher Guest login Proposal

Bugzilla: Add a teacher guest account – to allow teachers to explore aspects of the teacher side. Eric mentioned that the login code should be able to look at the referrer to decide where to go after logging in. Mihael has experienced some problems with the referrer in Tomcat.

References – Implementation.

• Put glossaries and references in the file system instead of the VDC
• News items and FAQs will be in the VDC.
• We will leave links to the logbook in the references.

Eventually we may want these to go into the wiki and we can try to testing using a link to the logbook from the wiki. Eric can try this.

Release strategy

Eric added a graphic to show how this works.New Release Process

Machine www12 will use a copy of the production database. When users move from "testing" on www12 to production they lose their work. Question: How often do we copy the production database for use in testing? We will only do the copying of the production database infrequently. Mihael does not think the code will change significantly that we would have to copy the production database everytime we wanted to test a new release.

We can always pull back for the database because we have backups. Th very process of copying the database can mess things up so we don’t want to do it very often. It is also time-consuming. Inexperienced people do not mess with this.

CMS e-Lab

Lot of interest from CMS at Geneva: We will revisit this after the holidays.

No meeting Dec. 26th; Next meeing Jan. 2nd when Mihael will report his progress.

-- Main.LizQuigg - 19 Dec 2007