2010: The Year in Review

As the year winds to a close and exams approach, now is probably a good time to consider the year we are leaving behind. It has been an eventful year, considering the advancement of a new committee from being relatively new to running the society successfully full time. We had many great weekly tutorials, though we had a rocky start with them. We got a new server, too. Click below to read more.

The Beginning

Freshers’ Week kick started the year by leaving the admins with the problem of new accounts. The system for adding new accounts to Spoon and Matrix was a complex one, and with everyone who actually knew how to use it graduated, it was left to the new admins to figure it out. Eventually, accounts were created and everyone was happy.

To fix this problem, a solution was drawn up: The accounts system would be replaced with LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), which means that all accounts would be stored in a central accounts database and each server would connect to that database in order to authenticate. A lot of other services have ‘bindings’ to LDAP, which eventually enabled us to let the forums use the same login as our servers.

Unfortunately, it took a while to get the LDAP stuff implemented and working, which meant that the old accounts scripts were still causing pains throughout the year. Finally, it seems like we can be rid of messiness for good.

Cube

Around November, it was decided to try to get funding from the CSC to purchase a new (unnamed) server. Thanks to our treasurer Simon Dardis, we succeeded in our application and ordered the server on December 11th, 2009.

• 2x Xeon 2.26 Ghz 8M cache
• 24 GB 1033Mhz memory
• 4x 500GB 8.2k RPM Hard Drives

Arrival

On 17th of December, 2009, the new server arrived. Unboxing as follows:

17/12

That day, of course, was fateful in itself. As well as Cube arriving, it was planned to upgrade hard drives in Spoon at the same time. Stephen, Shane, Jakub, and Simon went to the server room as part of this expedition.

As Spoon’s power supply was plugged back in, a spark caused a fuse to blow for the server room and the UPSs to revert to emergency battery power. Looking back, it seems almost humorous now, but at the time it was a very serious and scary event. Matrix was taken offline without notice, and various servers in the Maths department started losing power. Building services had to be called in order to gain access to the room with the circuit breakers, and extension cords were acquired in a rush in order to prevent any further loss in power.

18/12

The next day, Netsoc was in disarray. All servers were down and no one knew what was going to happen. Without servers, does Netsoc even exist? Spoon was taken in a taxi to Shane’s house, where its power supply was tested against a non mission-critical circuit. When it was decided that it was safe to turn back on, they brought it back. Matrix was turned back on as well. There were significant worries that its hard disks may be too old to spin up again, since they have been spinning non stop in living (council) memory. When Matrix (eventually, god solaris…) booted, everything seemed to be in order, however. Services were brought back up one by one, and then Spoon was turned on as well.

Of course, since 18/12 was the last day of college before a month of holidays, the question arose as to what to do with the new server. While the admins of the Maths server room were away, we could not rack up the server beside Spoon and Matrix. Simon and Jakub spent an hour chasing representatives of the CS server room, only to find that they had also left for the holidays. Without somewhere to set up the server, we would be a month behind schedule of launching the new server with all its services. At the last minute, we took it to the Netsoc room and set it up on the coffee table. At this point we had two hours to get it running before Goldsmith closed. But problems lay ahead…

The server, now dubbed Cube (named after the science fiction film, as suggested by Owen Cullen), did not have support for its network cards in standard Debian. We needed a certain version of the Linux kernel in order to get support for them. Even worse, since we were using an OpenVZ (a transparent virtualization solution) kernel, we would have to compile it ourselves, patching the kernel with OpenVZ and with the network drivers for Cube. Even worse, Goldsmith would close in an hour.

Resident genius, Stephen Dolan, configured and compiled the kernel in about 40 minutes, leaving just enough time to set up networking on Cube before we all had to leave. Over Christmas, Cube was remotely configured and services were ready for internal testing early in the new term.

Party

To commemorate the launch of Cube, a party was held in the Eliz room.

Unfortunately, Cube was not publicly accessible outside of college at the launch party, and as of writing, still isn’t. There is no definite timeframe for availability at this point.

Tutorials

We had a bunch of successful tutorials this year. Starting with a slightly dodgy Unix tutorial where no one actually had any shell accounts, we pulled off a great series starting with a HTML tutorial, then a Processing tutorial given by Jimmy, a Ruby tutorial given by Shane, then a C# tutorial given by Mark. Many first years attended our tutorials and we were greatly pleased by the turnout. Around this time, Joey Comeau of A Softer World fame was booked for a talk, but had to cancel at the last minute due to an airline mixup. An Objective-C/Cocoa tutorial gave many people an insight into Mac and iPhone programming. A Bash scripting tutorial was given, but the turnout was not so delightful. After Christmas, a series of successful Python tutorials were held by Simon and Jakub; probably the highest turnout of the year. Stephen Shaw gave a LaTeX tutorial, but unfortunately, ISS removed LaTeX from their machines the day before the tutorial began, and it had to be a lecture instead of a tutorial.

AGM

The AGM was held in the Lloyd Common Room on the 26th March. The results of the elections appear in the previous post to the Netsoc blog.

Many thanks to all our members for a great year, and many thanks to last year’s committee for all their hard work.

See you all again next year!