Information For New Computer Sciences Faculty (Summer 2008)

Welcome!

This document is to introduce the Computer Systems Lab (CSL), and to give you some information that we hope will be useful to you in the next few months.

Introduction to the Computer Systems Lab

The Computer Systems Lab is the computing facility for the Computer Sciences department. Unlike many departments, we support all apects of computing in the department: instructional, research and administrative uses. We think that this is one of our strengths: every user in the department has access to a wide variety of computing resources. Very little software is restricted to a specific segment of the department. Most likely the software that is on your desktop workstation is the same software that is available to students, and vice versa.

By leveraging computer support for a large number of users, we are able to provide first-class support at a reasonable cost.

The CSL carries out the policies set by the department Faculty and the Facilities Committee.

Computer Systems Lab Staff

The CSL has 8 full-time staff members. In addition, we have about 10 undergraduate students working 10-30 hours/week, doing a variety of support tasks.

The current CSL staff, their titles are specialties are listed below:

• Paul Beebe, Director
  • In addition to administrative work, Paul does "whatever has to be done."

• David Parter, Associate Director
  • In addition to administrative work, David maintains the budget; coordinates purchasing; coordinates the staff; takes care of the network and security issues; network services (particularly email); is the primary liaison to the various research projects; and deals with special projects.

• Michelle Craft
  • Michelle supervises the student staff and is responsible for system monitoring and web server infrastructure.

• Tim Czerwonka
  • Tim handles AFS and Windows.

• Peter Koczan
  • Peter works primarily on database applications; web applications; and data center setup.

• Jerel Mackay
  • Jerel is part of the Windows team; maintains the department database; and deals with web browsers.

• John Perkins
  • John is our Solaris expert; supports the X Window System; handles most license managers and licensed software; printing and printing-related software such as TeX; perl; and mailing lists, among other things. He also supports related software on Windows.

• Dave Thompson
  • Dave's primary areas of responsibility are Linux; backups and secure access.

The student staff handles backups; moving and repairing computers; and helping users; in addition to specific responsibilities assigned to various students.

Facilities and Services

Operating Systems

We support the following operating systems on desktop and server computers:

• Solaris8 on sparc (support mostly frozen)
• Linux:
  • Linux (RedHat Enterprise 5) on x86 or Athlon64 in 32-bit mode
  • Linux (RedHat Enterprise 5) on Opteron, Xeon and Core 2 Duo servers (server software only)
• Windows:
  • Currently we are support Windows XP on x86 workstations
  • we do not support Windows servers of any kind

Special arrangements can be made for other operating systems as needed by research projects.

Laptops

Laptops are by their very nature personal, and difficult to support in a consistant manner. Therefore, our current laptop suppport is very limited: we will assist with the purchase and warranty hardware support, and can provide some software that you can install. We are investigating additional value-added services for laptop users.

If you are planning to purchase a laptop, we strongly recommend IBM thinkpads. Please contact us to coordinate any purchases using UW funds.

File Systems

All of our supported computers (including Windows) use AFS for a site-wide file system. We currently do not support either Windows file server or NFS.

Each faculty member has a 5GB AFS quota. Graduate students have 3GB, and Undergradute majors have 2GB.

Research projects may rent additional AFS disk space. The current cost is $15/5 GB allocation semi-annually. Project space is in /p/project-name in AFS.

Servers

In addition to servers for the CSL Infrastructure, we often configure, purchase and maintain application-specific servers for research projects. If your project has specific computing needs that are not met by desktop workstations, please contact the lab and we will work with you to meet your needs.

We do not support any Windows servers.

Network

Our production networks are all 100 Mbit/second (workstations and some servers) or 1 Gbit/second ethernet (servers), with a Gigabit backbone. We have a 10 gigabit connections to the campus network backbone with a 1 Gbit/second backup connection.

We use firewalls to protect the CS network. At the network border, we block the most common port-based security vulnerabilities. This includes printing, tftp, netbios, sunrpc, and nfs. Internal firewalls protect specific networks within the department.

In addition to the production network, we have a network designated for unpatched and unsupported systems, which is configured so that it can only be reached from the production network, and is more heavily packet-filtered to restrict access. Unsupported, 'unsupportable', and unpatched computers are on this network in order to protect them from the internet, and to protect our network from security vulnerabilities and exploits on unsupported/unmaintained systems.

We can also configure additional networks and firewalls to meet specific research needs.

Printing

Faculty, staff and graduate students have unlimited black-and-white printing. Color printing costs must be charged to specific research grants. Students enrolled in CS courses are given 150 pages/course each semester, and can purchase additional paper at cost.

Printers are located on each floor.

Email

By default, all new accounts have their email delivered to our IMAP server. The IMAP server can only be used with an IMAP client that supports SSL (Mozilla/Thunderbird is one such client). Faculty, Staff and Research Assistants with Unix desktops can have their email delivered to their desktop workstation.

All new accounts are also configured to use SpamAssassin^? to filter spam. Users can customize their SpamAssassin^? settings.

Remote Access

Most faculty and staff (and many students) have cable modem or DSL internet connections at home through 3rd party providers.

The use of telnet and other remote access methods that use clear-text passwords is not allowed. SSH has been installed on all CSL supported Unix workstations. We are investigating a VPN service offering.

Communicating with the Lab

We are using a request-tracking system. To initiate a request, question or problem report, send email to lab@cs.wisc.edu. Please include as much information as possible.

Once your mail to lab has been recieved, it is assigned a number, which is added to the Subject: line in square brackets, and an acknowledgement is sent to you. For example:

Subject: Re: [CSL #12345] new faculty

Please save the acknowledgement mail. For any future email on the same issue, please reply to the acknowledgement mail, or to the email from CSL staff, and please keep the CSL # in the subject line (in square brackets), and remember to Cc: lab on your mail. This is the only way we keep related messages together.

If you have an issue you would like to discuss that can not be solved via email, please send mail to lab describing the issue and requesting a meeting. We'll research the issue and make sure that the appropriate staff person meets with you.

Purchasing Issues

The CSL staff will assist and coordinate any computer-related purchase by a member of the Department made with UW funds.

If the purchase is under $5,000 we can usually use the UW credit card, which skips all but step 1 below.

If the purchase requires a purchase order, it take a minimum of 2 weeks for the paperwork to go through, sometimes longer if any of the offices along the way are busy. Depending on how many computers we are getting, and if it is off-the-shelf or custom configured, it usually takes the vendors about a month to get a larger order of computers to us. Smaller orders of standard configurations are often delivered in one week.

Here's a recap of the purchasing process:

1. you decide what you want (possibly with our help -- more on that later)
2. bids:
   • if the total is < $5,000, then it is a best judgement purchase, and it does not have to go to bids. It may be possible to skip the rest of this process (see below).
   • if the total is > $5,000 and < $25,000, we can use simplified bids, which means that we get 3 bids by phone, fax or email, and if the purchasing department is satisfied, that is all.
   • anything over $25,000 has to go to official sealed bids, with the time period varying from 1 - 3 weeks.
   • if the item is on contract, we do not have to go to bids, but have to use the contract vendor.
3. we write a requisition
4. the L&S Dean's office checks the requisition and enters it into the accounting system
5. if your funding includes graduate school money, the graduate school Dean's office also has to check it.
6. if may have to go to research administration for review
7. it is checked by pre-audit
8. it is assigned to a purchasing agent. If possible, they place the order. Otherwise, they have to send it to bids, etc. and then place the order.

We try and do as much as possible for you, and if it is under $5,000 we can make the purchase using a UW credit card. That skips everything except step 1.

Here's whats involved in step 1 -- deciding what to buy:

• if you have specific needs, then you usually know what you want. If it is in any way a computer, we'd like to review your purchase to make sure we can support it.
• if you have general needs, we'll work with you to get what you want/need. We try very hard to standardize on a certain model of computers and standard components for each round of computer buys, so that we can more effectively support the computers.
• we'll do the shopping around for the best price, take care of the paperwork, and keep an eye on the order
• when the items arrive, we inventory them, install them, and lock them down in the office.

Another factor is that we (and everyone else in the University) are very busy in the first few weeks of the semester.

Getting a Computer for your Desk.

The Computer Systems Lab will provide you with a standard PC workstation (a 3.0GHz or faster Pentium IV or a 1.86 GHz or faster Core 2 Duo) running any of our supported operating systems (CentOS linux or Windows XP) for your desk for up to the first year of your appointment. This way you will not have to worry about purchasing a computer until you are settled in and can make a reasonable assessment of your needs.

Setting up your Account

In order to setup your account, we need the following information:

• University ID
• First Name
• Middle Name
• Last Name

Information we need as soon as you have it:

• UW Office (number)
• UW Building
• UW Phone
• UW Department

Optional information (used in printing the faculty/staff directory):

• Home Phone
• Home Address
• Spouse/Partner

In order to create an account, we also need 3 preferred login names (max 8 characters).

Additional Information/Questions

If you have any questions, or need additional information, please send mail to lab@cs.wisc.edu