Summary notes from the April 21 CHUG postponed to May 3rd
Slides are available here: Download
SSL/CUWebAuth/Confidential Data
A couple of months ago Andrea Beesing circulated an email reminding (and in some cases informing) everyone of the policy that SSL needs to be in place wherever CUWebAuth is protecting the site. In order to help bring us all into compliance with that policy, we recently sent out a survey asking about having SSL in place where CUWebAuth is in use and about confidential data. That survey is still open if you haven’t yet responded. The plan is to use the data from the survey to review Apache configs to be sure SSL is in place where it is expected and to identify other places where it should be, and then working with you to get SSL there. There is also an exception process for those sites that truly don’t need SSL
PCI
A CIT decision has been made to outsource all credit card processing including shopping carts. This is a change from our previous position that shopping carts could be run within the hosting environments resulting from a greater understanding of the requirements. We believe it will be more cost effective for the University to identify vendors who can maintain PCI Compliance than to do it ourselves. Dan Adinolfi (dra1) in the IT Security Office is working through the RFP process to identify vendors. Please contact Dan if you have specific questions.
Patching
Apache instances are being patched up to 2.2.17 along with supporting libraries. We expect it to be uneventful and will announce specific environments to the appropriate lists as they come up in the list. Semi-annual OS patching is under way as well.
ColdFusion
The webDAV /SVN fix is going in next week (see other announcement for more detail). We will then begin pushing hard for migrations from MSCF (CF7) with a goal if retiring MSCF by the end of the calendar year. ColdFusion 9.0.1 is available and we are working to get that scheduled.
CommonSpot
CommonSpot 6 migrations are under way. Nate will be in touch to get your site on the schedule if he hasn’t already. CommonSpot 6.1.1 has a dependency on ColdFusion 9.0.1 so that can’t be scheduled until after ColdFusion 9.0.1 is in place.
Static Web
We are having beginning conversations on how to migrate Static sites into VMs, more to come on that.
LAMP
The LAMP 2.0 project is still progressing, although slowly, at this point we’re looking at a June/July timeframe. We will be sending out questions to the LAMP Hosting list to gather feedback on final versions of php, perl, python; php modules; database access needs, etc. We’re also hiring and training student employees to migrate sites from LAMP 1 to LAMP 2 in order to minimize the time in which two LAMP environments are being supported. Outsourcing the CommonSpot migrations is working well so we thought we’d try it in LAMP too. We’ll be in touch with individual LAMP users as the release nears.
Portal
The replacement for uPortal.Cornell has been released, http://my.cornell.edu and the target for retiring it has been selected (June 1). Anyone interested in contributing content, say an rss feed for example, can contact Jon.
Questions/Comments
We are planning to set up an AdobeConnect session with a conference bridge for the next quarterly meeting.
We will also be looking into setting up OSQA (http://www.osqa.net/) as a forum/Q&A site (thanks to Dirk Swart for recommending it). More to come on that.
Next meeting: July 19, 2011 10:30am-11:30am