UCSB JOG REPORT Sept, 2002

• Several campus departments have begun discussing the need for a subcommittee to the Information Technology Planning Group (ITPG) to serve as a forum for presenting, discussing, and proposing solutions to campus-wide data issues. The hope is to form a subcommittee that will define and encourage campus wide best practices for design, implementation, and change menagement of the data stores that house institutional data.

• UCSB has begun an evaluation of the Pathways data presentation being developed by UCOP. In conjunction with a UC wide committee discussing Undergraduate Admissions issues, UCSB volunteered to evaluate UCOP's XML implementation with regard to data included/excluded, usability of the included data within a campus application, impacts of Pathways data on existing processes and procedures (identifying work step savings or additions), and suggestions for changes to the UCOP implementation that might provide additional benefit to the campus.

• UCSB continues to progress toward a software development environment that stresses reuse of component code to the greatest extend possible. This approach implies that campus software development groups have knowledge of existing components and have the ability to invoke the components across diverse development architectures (Java, .NET, etc). Based on overhead associated with Web Services, implementation of a formal Web Services architecture will probably not be the implementation path taken. However, the basic concepts of Web Services (easy access to, and reuse of common components) are certainly the goal. A critical piece of this approach is the development of mainframe based brokers which provide access to data stored in Adabas when invoked by common components. To this point, we've developed brokers that represent a large percentage of the necessary functionality (interfaces to financial data, budget data, student data).

• Authentication: The UCSB Directory (LDAP) continues to evolve as the source of truth for individuals currently associated with UCSB. As a step in that evolution, the 2002-2003 Campus Directory (paper) is being published from the campus directory. In addition, the UCSB Directory is also the source of data to be used for publication of the UC Directory.

• Authorization: Implementation of authorization tools integrated with the UCSB Directory remains a high priority at UCSB. We're currently resisting pressure to incorporate custom role definition elements in the directory.

• BARC, the Billing, Accounts Receivable, and Cashiering System, has entered the final stages of integration testing. During Fall quarter, the new BARC system will run in shadow operation with the existing system to verify the implementation in an "operational environment". Also during Fall quarter, necessary campus coordination will be accomplished in order to allow new BARC to go live in January 2003.

• Implementation of the fully automated Transfer of Funds (TOF) system has entered the final stages of development. The decision was made to enhance the TOF system with Resource Allocation and Provisioning functionality before releasing it for general campus use. TOF is a Java (JSP based) application that incoporates necessary approval/workflow steps and is fully integrated with the mainframe based Financial and Budget data stores. The integration is accomplished using the mainframe based brokers mentioned above.

• Implementation of the Tranfer of Expenditure Web Application (TEWA) is in the implementation stage. TEWA makes use of many of the same components (authentication, authorization, workflow, mainframe interfaces) developed for TOF and is also a Java (JSP based) application.

UCSB CPG REPORT Sept, 2002

·     On August 10, 2002 we cut over to our new NEAX2400 IPX telephone switch and a Baypoint Innovations NuPoint Messenger model 640 voice server. 

o      NEC performed excellent project management and kept the project on time.

o      The last time that we changed telephone systems we had over 1,000 trouble tickets due to cabling problems, and this time we had less than 100.

o      We only had ~300 total trouble tickets and most of the issues were either voicemail or Restricted Service Calls.

o      USC is getting our former Centrex switch.

·     We currently have 7 Cellular Sites on campus and 5 more locations are being considered.  Pay Telephones are being taken out due to loss of income.

·     The Next Generation Backbone (NGB) Phase I went into production on August 7, 2001.  Phase I provides the following benefits to 35 buildings: more bandwidth, reduced connection costs, centralized routing services, and more efficient use of the campus backbone fiber.  Forty units now receive centralized routing services and 13 units maintain a departmental router.  We are on schedule to shut down the old FDDI backbone on September 30, 2002.  Phase II will bring the benefits of NGB to an additional 60 buildings as well as upgrade the speed of the connections to some of the Phase I buildings.  We have requested estimates for proposed enhancements to the backbone fiber cable plant and are beginning the network design.

·     Like the other members of CalREN-2, UCSB will be transitioning to the new Optical Network Infrastructure (ONI) during the next year.  Unlike most of the participants, the ONI backbone will run through campus.  In order to attach to this new backbone, we need to upgrade our existing fiber route and in the future create a new route to the west of campus for added redundancy.  On April 1, 2002 we began the project to upgrade the existing route.  We are working to identify a location for the two racks of ONI long-haul equipment. 

·     By the end of September, we will be almost complete with 6 of 7 Phase I Intrabuilding Wiring (IBW) projects.  We have 26 Phase II projects in progress.  We received 17 new projects to consider for Phase III in addition to projects left unfunded after Phases I & II.

·     We registered 21,999 incidents in our security database last year.   Over 99% of these were non-UCSB hosts scanning UCSB hosts (1 scan every 24 minutes).  A mostly automated process allows us to report between 80 – 90% of these scans to the offending host’s ISP.  The remaining 197 incidents involve worms, host compromises, denial of service attacks, and email abuses.  The greatest challenge is educating network managers on effective ways of maintaining a reasonable level of security on computers in their networks as well as the importance of such maintenance.