Usage in June 2003  Summary

A Popular Web Server A Popular Web Server for Astronomy Education in Chinafor Astronomy Education in China

Chenzhou CUI, Yongheng ZHAO National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Advantages of Internet Education

• Various forms: web page, forum, chat room, BBS, etc. • Multimedia: text, picture, audio, video, etc. • Real time: news, instant message, real video, etc.• Wide audience: no limit on age, sex, nation and …• Convenient access: no limit on time and place

Difficulties Facing Astronomy Education in China

• Absence of educator: Astronomy does not appear in school curriculum. • Absence of Chinese resources: Only one open-published magazine for

astronomy education and popularization in Chinese mainland. Quite a part of existing materials are out of date.

• Construction of education website is difficult: Free web space is becoming less and less. Advertisements from commercial free web space providers are boring.

Mission and goals

To provide high quality free web space service to individuals and organizations to construct astronomy education websites:

• super-large space• high stability

To make the web server the first choice for Chinese astronomy education websites, to let the server hold the most abundant Chinese astronomy education resources, to improve teaching and learning of astronomy in China.

Services provided to users 

• 500 MB webpage space• Specific domain name for each user• SSH + SFTP ports connection• MySQL + phpMyAdmin DBMS service• PHP script language support

Security 

• Server access: SSH+SFTP connection• File security: Special user privilege set. User of the server can only access his own files. • Data security: Disk to disk backup periodically by shell scripts.

Future Plans

• Upgrade of software and hardware: To give opportunity for more users• To enhance service items: ASP, Servlet support• To improve quality of service• Automated data backup and management: RAID 1+0• To improve the efficiency of user management

Summary

The web server has become an important resource for astronomy education in China and a window of NAOC on public education.

Sponsored by National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) and Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) project.

Server Configuration  Hardware system

It’s really a very common personal computer.  Software System

All software is open source packages.

3Com PCI 3c905C

SeagateST380021A (80GB)+ST317242A (17GB)

1 GB ASUS P4BIntel Pentium 4 CPU 1.60GHz

NICHard DiskMemoryMain boardCUP

AWStats 5.5PHP 4.2.2MySQL 3.23.51+phpMyAdmin2.5.1

Apache 1.3.26

Red Hat Linux release 7.3

Logfile Analyzer

Script Language

DBMSWWW Server

OS

Usage Statistics

User profession statistics

  Up to July 7th, over 60% of the 78 website owners on the server are students, including secondary level school students and college students. They learn much about astronomy by maintaining their websites and share their knowledge with others.

Unique Unique visitorsvisitors

Number of visitsNumber of visits PagesPages HitsHits BandwidthBandwidth

175837175837 269143269143(1.53 visits (1.53 visits per visitor)per visitor)

26568732656873(9.87 pages(9.87 pages

per visit)per visit)

1357152413571524(50.42 hits (50.42 hits

per visit)per visit)

118.53 GB118.53 GB(461.79 KB (461.79 KB

per visit)per visit)

Hits vs. Days

On June 17th, network service of NAOC's ISP had been broken for half a day.The lowest peak occurs on Tuesday, most people are concentrating themselves on study and work, while the second lowest peak occurred on Sunday is because of people are enjoying their weekend.

  Hits vs. Hours Visits reach peak at evening. The lowest peak occurs at early morning, because most people go to bed. Two other low peaks occur at lunchtime and suppertime, i.e. 12 and 18.