ATN Web Systems
Introduction
Our primary mission is to maintain server hardware, install and maintain
critical software, maintain security, provide Tier III support for the
ITRC and plan for future growth and developing technologies. While
our primary customers are students, faculty and staff, our web systems
have a state, nation and international interest. ATN Web Systems
serves the core web services for UNC-CH. However, there are web servers
scattered all over campus--too many to mention. Think of www.unc.edu
as the main hub that links to all web services on campus. One of
our biggest customers is the Center for Instructional Technology
(CIT) hosting hundreds of courses online and growing rapidly.
Departmental and personal pages are also served up from here. HTML
content is maintained by their owners directly. We have numerous
pages installed on local disk, but we are moving rapidly to have all web
pages stored and served from AFS
space via the DCI Group.
Using DCI we can easily scale our web services to multiple servers.
Users with AFS clients may easily mount their HTML space locallly on their
PC for editing. Any changes made are almost instantly published through
the main web server.
Here is a sample of the content we serve up:
-
Personal (staff, faculty, students)
-
Departments
-
Organizations (professional, student, etc.)
-
Web course discussion forums
-
Online courses
-
Multimedia streaming
-
Onyen management
Who We Are
First, there is Joe Morris who is the Web Systems Manager. Joe is
responsible for the overall operation of these systems. This includes
maintaining the overall health of each system, ensuring security and adapting
to changing technologies.
Linda Jen is the Web Systems Assistant Manager. She is primarily
responsible for analyzing our current systems for performance, maintaining
backups, handling requests via Remedy, keeping operationg systems and applications
patched and providing system programming development and support for various
cgi-bin applications.
Sid Stafford is the Web Systems Applications Programmer. He is focused on
working with UNC-CH departments and organization integrate various web applications
into our infrastructure. Most common is Java, PHP and our Blackboard application.
Technical Specifications
Our core services depends on the following hardware and software:
- Sun 3x00
- Sun Netra AC200
- Sun Enterprise 220R
- Sun Enterprise 420R
- Sun Enterprise 280R
- IBM eSeries X330
- Solaris
- RedHat Linux
- Apache
- PHP
- Java (Tomcat, servlets, Cocoon, etc.)
Projects
- Blackboard 6 migration
- Improve help documentation
- Integrate NetApp
- Finish migration to Linux for www.unc.edu
- mod_auth_kerb with pts control
- Apache 2
- Nagios
- Cookie-based server load balancing
- Upgrade web stats software
- Search engine upgrade
- UNC-CH webmasters update/meeting