Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

Share Your Ideas with Blogs@UCI

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Blogs@UCI

Blogs@UCI is a new blog service for UC Irvine. It allows you to create a blog quickly and start posting news, video, audio or anything you want to share with the world.  (Blogs, short for weblogs, are online journals.)  Blogs@UCI is built on WordPressMU, a multi-user version of WordPress. WordPress is an open-source blog publishing application.  It is also the application used for publishing IT News, so if you’re reading this article, you’re probably already familiar with WordPress.

Currently, faculty, staff and graduate students can create blogs using this service. Undergraduate students who are collaborating with faculty or staff can participate in blogging by being given access by their faculty or staff sponsor.

Blogs@UCI is similar to commercial blogging services like Blogger, LiveJournal, and WordPress.com. All have a simple and easy to use interface for updating blogs. We are ad-free and the entries can easily be exported and backed up in an open format. There’s also the added benefit of having the UCI branding and domain for your blog address.

Blogs@UCI uses UCInetIDs to authenticate, so creation, access, and privacy are all managed in terms of existing UCI electronic identities.

If you would like to establish a group, or shared blog, you may create a new blog and add UCI users. The other members of your blog will need to have a UCI.edu email address and a UCInetID.

Before starting a blog, it is worth noting the very nature of blogging is to share information with the world. When you publish an entry on your Blogs@UCI weblog, you are essentially posting on a public website. Anyone who knows the address of your website can see it and share the link with others. If you want to blog and keep your identity private, consider a commercial service like Blogger, LiveJournal or WordPress.com. There is an option within Blogs@UCI to create “private” posts which require a password. You may also block search engines from finding your blog.

By default, we have comment moderation turned on. That means that comments to your blog are held for your approval before becoming public.  We have also installed Akismet Spam protection which does a good job of filtering out spam.

You can learn more about Blogs@UCI in our online FAQ .

Departmental Servers Go Virtual

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Virtual Servers

With OIT’s new Virtual Server Hosting service, units which need a server for a departmental web site or application hosting can provide those services to their faculty, staff, and students with all the advantages of a professionally managed Data Center but at a much lower cost.

A virtual server or virtual machine (VM) is the software emulation of a physical server’s hardware and services, and can be configured to meet the needs of a particular group of users.  A single high-end physical server or cluster can simulate a large number of servers, and make more efficient use of physical resources such as disk, memory, and network bandwidth than stand-alone servers can.

With OIT’s VM service, customers may install, configure, and manage the operating system and applications of their choosing, to meet local needs. Administrators can quickly configure and deploy VMs without concern for the purchase, maintenance or replacement of the underlying hardware. As the service is hosted on OIT’s enterprise infrastructure in the Academic Data Center, customers enjoy the benefits of redundant, highly available systems which are often beyond the means of smaller departments.

This service helps increase server reliability, as well as achieve campus goals of efficiency in power and cooling. Old, unreliable equipment can be retired, while the server’s software and function is retained.

The VM service is hosted on an HP blade server chassis.  Each blade has four gigabit Ethernet network controllers, and the maximum possible memory. Storage is provided by OIT’s enterprise disk storage from NetApp. In addition to the high-availability features in the hardware components, the VMWare virtual environment allows for dynamic movement of servers across physical hosts, as well as automatic restarts for the VMs.

OIT’s VM service uses the same infrastructure as OIT’s other enterprise services: earthquake protection tables, redundant power sources, large-scale UPS, data center chilled-water cooling, on-site emergency cooling, and generator-backup power.

More information on configuration options and pricing can be found on the Virtual Server Hosting web site.

New on EEE: Custom email Reminders for Surveys and Quizzes

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Survey

The EEE Web Team has added a new feature to EEE Survey and Quiz, custom email reminders, which can be scheduled by administrators.  Any identified participant who has not completed the survey or quiz by the selected date and time will be sent a copy of the email. Participants who have already submitted the survey or quiz will not be sent reminders, so administrators can schedule as many emails as needed without filling the inbox of those who have already participated.

Learn more – Survey | Quiz

Mainframe Migrated to UCOP

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Mainframe

An intensive six-month migration process was recently completed when operations of UCI’s administrative IBM mainframe were transferred to a UCOP-managed system in Oakland.

UCI has been using an IBM mainframe for administrative processing since 1990, and the current system received its most recent hardware upgrade in 2005.  Rather than continue to invest in hardware upgrades, maintenance costs, and related expenses, it was decided the campus would receive better value by hosting its administrative applications on UCOP’s system.

The UCOP system now hosts UCI’s General Ledger, Transfer of Expense (TOE), Purchasing/Accounting Link (PAL), and other applications.  Some additional services are run on Oakland’s system, while the user interface is still provided by OIT locally, such as the Electronic Data Library (EDL) and the Permanent Budget System.

OIT remains responsible for all application administration, programming, report distribution, and printing, so UCI faculty and staff continue to be supported locally as before.

UCI is one of the first UC campuses to achieve cost-savings through the use of a “mainframe logical partition” at UCOP, along with UCSB.  Other campuses, including UCR, are in the process of a similar migration.  Cost savings are achieved through economies of scale in maintenance and software licensing.  UCI expects to save over $150,000 in FY10/11 as a result of the migration.

Advanced Webfiles Collaboration and Sharing Techniques

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WebFiles

UCI has long provided faculty, staff, and graduate students a flexible, online, file sharing service in Webfiles. An introductory article on Webfiles can be found in the IT News Archives.

The simple Webfiles operations – uploading documents, setting permissions, creating directories – are easily mastered.  However, Webfiles has features very useful in file sharing which are not as obvious but that you should be aware of.

Tickets

Tickets are a method for defining permissions to a document or directory in your Webfiles account, which you can then email to other people so they can access the material.  They act as web links which take your colleague directly to the document.  You can specify such things as a window of time in which access is granted, whether it grants read-only permission or read-write, or even that a document may only be accessed a fixed number of times.  You can specify a password and share that separately, in the event the URL gets publicized to people you didn’t mean to give access.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are shortcuts to files and directories in your account – or that of someone else to which you’ve been granted access.  They are presented in their own small area on the left hand side of the Webfiles display.  Like bookmarks in a web browser, you can add, delete, and rename your bookmarks.

Groups

Ordinarily, Webfiles allows you to grant read, read-write, or other permissions to individuals, to all Webfiles users, or to the world at large.  If you wish only a certain group of Webfiles users to access one of your documents, you can define a group that includes just them, and then grant that group the desired privileges.

Quotas

You may specify a disk quota for any directory in your Webfiles account, placing a ceiling on the amount of data that may be stored in that directory.  This can be useful if you create a directory for others to deposit documents, and you want to limit the amount of your 2Gb Webfiles storage capacity you wish consumed.  You can also paritition your account, assigning a fraction of your storage to each one.  This allows you to use one directory principally, but if you run out of space you can count on having some spare for short-term emergency use until you have a chance to delete some files.

Web sites

You can publish simple web sites using your Webfiles account by creating an index.html file, uploading it into one of your directories, and granting access permissions to others.  The webfiles directory path (e.g., https://webfiles.uci.edu/UCInetID/directory/) becomes the URL for your new web  site.

WebDAV

WebDAV is a technology that allows you to access your Webfiles account as if it were a local directory, allowing you to view the files, open, edit, and save documents in place, browse sub-directories, drag-and-drop, etc.

If you would like more information about Webfiles, consider attending one of OIT’s quarterly classes, accessbile through TED.