Kevin McDonalds Blog

The AppHosting team migrated the existing hosts and service configurations from the old Nagios to the new version, and it went live on Friday March 28^th, 2008. The quantity and quality of the checks is a great enhancement to ITS and Vanderbilt. The server is performing very well considering that it is an extremely trim server compared to the current server. Below is some data from the migration.

Old            New

Hosts Monitored        319            329

Services Monitored        657            884

Service Groups        16            35

Application Hosting rolled out the new DNS architecture. The new system is running a fully integrated DNS/DHCP/IP Management solution and went in with zero downtime. There were only six errors reports in over 29,000 records throughout 430 separate domains that were converted. This includes an upgrade from BIND8 to BIND9, a redesign of how the DNS topography was layed out, and introduction of a new management layer – using Diamond IP.

Currently, ITS is serving up over 1.5 million DNS queries per hour without any hiccups. The transition was transparent to the vast Vanderbilt community, and the entire Internet.

Application Hosting staff deployed Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation (PDR) this month. PDR uses a combination of local, predictive behavioral data and globally-observed reputation-analyzed by powerful machine learning algorithms-to block incoming connections from malicious IP addresses. This process will help decrease the amount of SPAM that makes it through the mail gateways.

Application Hosting staff participated in the new Chancellor announcement with responsibilities such as removing the redirect to the interim chancellor site and ensuring that the new content was web accessible.

As part of the Sharepoint rollout, MS Project 2007 is now online and appears to be working as described. The only functionality not deployed was some configuration related settings which will be addressed during the “enhancement phase” of the SharePoint project.

Additional disk space was added to the virtual machine providing the web service for the Sitemason frontend. This was a relatively easy task involving the creation of another virtual disk and addition to the web content volume.

The following physical servers were powered off and removed from the Hill Data Center to be prepped for disposal. The services of most of these machines have been turned into “Virtual Machines.”

The Projector and Port Block applications have been migrated over to the main ITS website after the power supply failure. The Xserve is now merely providing a redirect page to the current locations. All existing links to these two applications have been found and corrected. The change to remove the Xserve hardware has been scheduled for Apr 7^th, 2008.

Application Hosting Staff added another aliased virtual interface to VICC virtual machine to handle the new MC intranet website., and created another Apache virtual host as a placeholder for the content.

• 150 Magic Tickets were processed in Applications Hosting.
• 14 IMAP to Exchange Mailbox Migrations
• 1 additional staff obtained the VCP Certification (VMWare Certified Professional)
• 1additional staff attended the “Legato Networker” training
• 1 Staff attended SNIA Storage Networking Foundations course
• 1 Staff obtained the “2003 MCSE+Messaging” certification
• 1 Staff obtained the MCSA for 2003 certification
• Annual Staff Evaluations were finalized and delivered.