Pat Nolan maintained many essential LAT collaboration services on the servers on campus. We could consider moving some of these services to SLAC. The goal would be to ensure future maintainability, and to enhance integration between the campus and SLAC web sites (for example by using the same login for both sites). Any changes would have to be made slowly and carefully, probably over the period of 1-2+ years. Pat's notes on the campus serves are attached.
Some very brief ideas for some items which could be moved are presented below. At this moment these are just ideas, we would need to look in detail to understand what exists on campus and how and if pieces could by moved without breaking other things.
- User database
- Currently the master people database is kept on campus.
- We have a script which pulls data out of this database and merges any changes into the "GroupManager" database at SLAC
- We could reverse this process and make the SLAC personnel database the master, and synchronize changes to this back to campus.
- Web accessible version of CVS
- Currently this is done by rsyncing the contents of CVS from SLAC onto the campus server and running viewvc there.
- It would be possible to replace this by fisheye instance running at SLAC
- Would be integrated with confluence/SLAC login ids.
- MySQL
- Could migrate existing database to centrally supported (and backed up) mysql at SLAC
- This could be done while maintaining campus access to the database
- Mailing Lists
- SLAC now has new mailing list software with enhanced capabilities.
- We could move the mailling lists from the campus computer to SLAC.
- It would probably be possible to maintain this existing mail addresses so this change would be mostly transparent to users of the lists.
- We would have to maintain the old message archives
- Pub board
- I am not very familiar with the full capabilities of this service, but it would be good to understand this in some more detail.
- Other Web site features
- We had started discussing with the possibility of using the same confluence/SLAC ids on the campus web site as at SLAC. He had created a prototype implementation of this already. This is a project we may want to continue.
- There are many components to the website, some of which could benefit from closer integration with services at SLAC. The implementation of the current site would need to be studied to understand what could be moved without other things.