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Cross University Open-Source Collaboration

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Goal

Offer rationale for open collaborationand

share experiences

I will be asking questions of you throughout!

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Overview of Presentation

• Why open source software (OSS)?• Rescomp's Environment and Experience• Your Environment and Experience• Moving forward• Discussion

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Open vs Closed

• Open– Dependent on community rather than vendor– Can customize as needed– Potentially larger support base

• Closed– Vulnerable to vendor's business decisions– Staff aren't necessarily needed for modifications

http://www.edtechmag.com/higher/may-june-2007/focus.html

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Must we be open?

• Public funding – public goods• Student staff may learn more from OSS• It's not obvious either way.• However, 'should' or 'can'...it's fun!

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Observations

•Residential Networks within Universities have a number of shared “problem domains”.•Not all Residential Networks have the same problem domains or resources.•Resnet provides a coordination point for those who could benefit from working together.

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Example Projects

• Kuali – Core systems infrastructure and apps• Sakai – Educational Collaboration• Tillikum – Housing Info Managment• NetReg – Network Access Control• VT WSUS – Windows Patch Management• And many more...how will we know what's

available?!

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Rescomp's Environment

• Approximately 50 staff members• 8000 node network• Customer support for ~7000 residents• 30 *nix or BSD servers• 8 student staff working on software• Oversight by peer review and several career

staff

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Rescomp's Experience

• Bugzilla – 6 years of use• TWiki – 1.5 years of use• Mailman – 1 instance for more than 6 years• PostgreSQL – several instances for most of site for 6

years• Request Tracker – in development

Have not opened in-house applications but have participated in wider OSS community through various uses.

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Issue Tracking

• In-House– We have an integrated helpdesk that frontline

support staff use.– Also a web-based computer lab issue tracker

• OSS– Bugzilla – for use internally for both software and

non-software requests– Request Tracker – replacement for simple Mailman

lists

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Bugzilla

• Business Need– Issue Tracking– Procurement

• Technical Challenges– Requires management of LAMP stack

• Results– Met small group needs over 6 years– Awkward for non-software issues

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Documentation/Collaboration

• In-House– Docbook SGML wrapper

• OSS– Twiki – Used for team coordination, meeting

minutes, one-off issue tracking– Mailman archives for searching– Subversion hooks into Bugzilla

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TWiki

• Business Need– Centralized site-wide documentation

• Technical Challenge– Maintenance– Performance

• Results– Increased and more useful documentation– Additions through plugins were very useful

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User Management

• In-House– Sync scripts in cron written in perl

• OSS– OpenLDAP – Used for several purposes as well as

user management– Samba – Used in combination with OpenLDAP for

Windows integration– Jxplorer – Manipulation of LDAP directory– PostgreSQL – Long term reliable storage of user

data for use in web apps

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PostgreSQL

• Business Need– Storage of user information

• Technical Challenge– Requires tuning

• Results– Received fantastic support through community

mailing lists, IRC, and documentation.

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Server Management

• In-House– ConfMan – Configuration management– Misc scripts in crons

• OSS– Nagios – Monitoring and issue tracking with

Bugzilla– FreeBSD – Our OS of choice– NFS, PAM, LDAP – Technologies we used to provide

a consistent working environment

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FreeBSD Operating System

• Business Need– Support for windows workstations

• Technical Challenges– Managing many server configurations with small

part-time staff.• Results

– Easily manageable lightweight server infrastructure– Great support from mailing lists and

documentation

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Our In-House Software

• Current Applications– NAC– Helpdesk– Web-based Computer Lab Management– Hour tracking for front-line support staff– Security Case Handler

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Q/A and Info Gathering

• What is your environment like?• What has been your experience with OSS?• What have you written in-house?

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Possible Approaches

• Rewrite applications together• Release what we have and let others modify• Sanitize & Generalize• Agree on standards that allow interoperation

and then divide and conquer

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Challenges for Opening Up

• Would require a high degree of customizations• Ontology and Business Logic specific to

departmental groups, i.e. alphabet soups.• IP Conflicts with University

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Will opening up work for you?

• We've heard about a few environments.• We've seen some challenges and approaches.• How can we find out?

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What have people tried?

• Who has:– ...tried incorporating someone's work?– ...released their in-house software?

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What could be next?

• Community Portal - Sakai?• Standards Group - Kuali?• Sharing what we have:

– Software Registry, e.g. Sourceforge– Mailing lists– BoF – Tuesday 11:30am in IR/PS

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Discussion• Will Open Source work for ResNet?• Is Kuali enough?• How can we avoid “design by committee”?• What can we do now?

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Evaluations

• Go to “Presentation Evaluations” at:

http://resnetsymposium.org/resnet2007