April through June 2009
This quarter saw significant changes in personnel with layoffs early
in the quarter. These layoffs have caused significant impact on how
our regular work gets done - in some cases doing more work and in other
cases we have had process improvements. Team morale has been fragile
given staffing changes but it is improving. Promised changes at the
highest level have had impact by keeping fever, uncertainty and doubt
at a reasonably high level. Given the events of the last year, this
appears to be a new normal, unfortunately.
My apologies to any members of DSPS if I have missed any important
activities. We do quite a bit these days. I have to say I am quite
pleased with the overall activity of the team noting how we very much
sit in the middle of things and have to work closely with other teams
to be able to get our work done - we are not an independent entity for
almost all of what we do. We can't get our jobs done unless we collaborate
with others. I thank the team for their continued diligence and professional
behavior in the face of adversity.
AMIT - Application Management and Integration Team
AMIT participates on various projects as a catalyst for technical issues.
Major projects for AMIT involved IS&T Website, Debathena, Wikis and assisting
in various ways with the many projects around ISDA. The IS&T Website has
largely on production from the perspective of AMIT. Working closely with
NIST to provide technology and methodology to meet NIST requirements. Website
has been a challenging project involving significant staff time for 2 members
of the team.
Wikis was upgraded to 273 on April 1. Further work on wikis finally fixed our
performance problems plaguing us for last 2 years. We initiated the process
for upgrading Wikis to Confluence 3.0 bringing it forward 4 major software releases.
This also involved significant infrastructural changes to the application
involving LDAP integration, switching to Tomcat-6, database modifications along with
eliminating lots of custom code while providing additional functionality.
Debathena (formerly known as Athena 10) has gone live in some student clusters.
This is a significant effort culminating 18 months of work by Bob Basch,
Andrew Boardman and Bill Cattey providing significant changes to underlying OS
technology as well as process changes for Athena OS. Largely seen as a behind the
scenes effort - this work will have long-term effect on MIT keeping pace with
the ever-changing world of Linux. Approximately 50% of amb time on Debathena.
AMIT continues to provide various forms of assistance on an as-needed basis for
Events Calendar, DCAD, Stresstester and Web/Application Server technology around
IS&T.
Identity Services (touchstone metrics at bottom of narrative)
We deployed a new WAYF for Touchstone making it cleaner and easier to use. We
continue to provide development and support for Touchstone in close collaboration
with NIST - carefully following NIST operating rules. About 25% of rbasch time
is spent on Debathena. We began working with Alumni to switch to Touchstone and
take on about 100K users into CAMS. This work is proceeding. Working closely
with NIST we have finally deployed a production LDAP service viable for application
use. Apps configured to use the directory but not yet production are: Wikis,
Bamboo, Nexus, Drupal, Moira-Web NG (probably others). NIST is using this new
LDAP for various services as well. rbasch has also been working towards providing
the shibboleth SP 2.1 while keeping up with support requests for additional
touchstone related services. pbh and rbasch have also spent significant time with
MIT Libraries helping them to shib enable several applications along with the
EZProxy infrastructure component used widely. We also deployed a fix to allow
the iPhone to use certificates with Touchstone where iPhones were not working
properly with regular certificate enabled applications.
We completed RolesUI - reworking of the web based Roles interface. A significant
effort by Vijay Konda along with Paul Hill. Both Paul and Vijay also play central
roles in the development of perMIT. Given all the challenges of the last year,
fiscal and delayed talent acquisition, perMIT has been running behind. As a Big
Initiative project it completes June 30, 2009. This project will continue as part
of normal project work into 2010 with the intent of deploying perMIT at MIT. We
made significant progress in perMIT, much more than we expected given the challenges
but we have not delivered on a viable product for MIT or the outside community. We
have succeeded in developing significant interest from the outside community as
many are realizing the efficacy and viability of perMIT.
Developer Tools
David Tanner and Gongqin Li have been working to finish up our developer tools
offerings. By the end of July we will roll out a Maven repository used to maintain
java related components such as jar files and a continuous build server by Atlassian
callled Bamboo. These components will serve developers, along with our SVN code
repository to allow for more effective group development of Java applications supported
by common repositories, consistent code build and testing along with appropriate access
to these components. Putting these components have taken quite some time due to
some historical false starts and multiple directions pursued. This effort will conclude
with a set of tools integrated into our infrastructure and should remain viable for
the next few years. Congratulations to David and Gongqin on the completion of this
effort.
SoftWare Release Team (SWRT)
SWRT began its transition from CSS to ISDA during this quarter. The team
changed at the time of the CSS reorg and was reduced from 8 to 3 members.
At the end of May Atticus announced his departure for June 30 - so we are
now at only 2 positions awaiting EVP approval to fill the vacant position.
The team moved to W92 at the very end of the quarter. During these changes
the SWRT released 6 software updates and responded to 58 support and licensing
requests via the SWRT RT queue. The team has initiated preparations for the
next major releases for Mac OS and Windows - both releases expecting to take
reasonable time and effort to understand, document and deploy. The team put
installers for TSM (mac, win, linux), VirusScan (mac) and X-Win32.
Mobility
You will find attached a very nice set of metrics and a summary of current
development activities for Mobility. We are in the process of transitioning
from use of contractors to in-house developers due to budgeting limitations
moving forward. Amon Horne and David Tanner will be devoting 20% time each
towards Mobile development activity. Getting started with this transition has
been somewhat challenging due to other projects starting and concluding. For
Amon, MITBI is a priority and David Tanner is working to conclude his efforts
on DevTools. We hope to have effectively transitioned dev efforts by September.
Andrew Yu continues to be the lead on the overall effort and he has initiated
iMobileU as an initiative amongst various HE institutions to further the usage
and development of the MIT Mobile platform.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Touchstone Metrics
Core IdP Application Access involving AuthN: 41664
Core IdP Application Access Single sign-on: 40148
Total App Access requests for Core IdPs: 81812 (Q2 was 66703)
Logins by Method:
username/password: 35366
MIT Certificates: 5661
Kerberos: 637
By Applications: Stellar=71518, Wikis=2325, Jira=2286, Thalia=1679
rolesapp=84, developers.mit.edu=68
Remaining apps are non-production or not-yet production or not yet worth mentioning.
CAMS IdP Application Access involving AuthN: 9317
CAMS IdP Application Access Single sign-on: 56564
Total App Access requests for Core IdPs: 65881 (Q2 was 218)
By Applications: Stellar=63712, Wikis=1529
Stellar is so large as it's configuration is broken due to lack of architectural understanding.
This may get rectified shortly.
Total CAMS accounts is about 3500. In December 31, 2008 we had 65. We are working
to obtain the Alumni community which will add about 100K.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Web Services Statistics
(2008-Q2)
Avg response times (success/exceptions) in milliseconds:
Geo(1202/708), UA(113/61), MITID(4194/1830), Moira(84/136)
MITID has interesting heuristics affecting it's times hence the multi-second
response. This is normal.
2009-Q4
Geo(986/708), UA(4274/678671), MITID(3295/2584), Moira(596/494)
UA response times are out of whack (and will be going forward) due to a
Roles outage on 6/23/2009.
January through March 2009
No updates posted.
October through December 2008
...