1 Jan 2006:

Over the break, Institute lab staff and student lab assistant Don Lee were busy preparing the labs for the Winter quarter.

Here is what happened over the break:

1. General Development (GenDev) Labs
   1. Workstations
      • applied all current Windows critical patches and video driver updates

      • added applications and support files for the TCSS458 Computer Graphics course

      • Removed Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 Pro and replaced it with Visual Studio 2005 Pro, at the request of Prof. Sam Chung

      • fixed all known problems with the Autumn 2005 image (e.g., Office startup problems, missing Equation Editor, slow startup times for Eclipse)

      • The JDBC drivers for the mysql, SQL Server 2000, Oracle, DB2, and Firebird DBMSes were updated to their latest versions

      • Remote debugging of Tomcat applications

        Support for this has been temporarily removed, until either a need for it arises again or we have time to re-enable it.

2. Student-Administered Labs

   The Windows partition of the SCI113 removable hard drives were updated with Windows critical security patches and Visual Studio 2003 Pro was replaced with Visual Studio 2005 Pro.

3. Repository (cssgate/respos) Server Changes

   We had planned on doing this hardware/software changeover over the summer of 2005, but were unable to be ready for Autumn 2005 quarter. Consequently, we kept the old versions of the applications, which caused one incompatibility problem with running a Java application.

   Cormac did the vast majority of work on this transition, making it as seamless as possible. Great job, Cormac!

   1. Hardware changes

      We are now running the software on new server hardware; spec-wise, it is twice as fast (2.8Ghz) and has twice as much RAM (2GB). This hardware should be more reliable than the old system, but it will not necessarily be more available -- we have yet to make it clustered, and it still relies on a single point of failure -- the disk storage for home directories. We plan on addressing those issues throughout the quarter.

   2. Software upgrades
      • Operating system: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server (RHEL AS) 4.0, with the latest updates.

      • MySQL: version 5.0.15 (includes stored procedure support)

        This is the latest stable version that worked under RHEL AS.

      • Tomcat: version 5.5.12

        Changes to existing build.properties files are required for pre-existing projects to work. Please see the support sections on Using Tomcat (shared server) and Using Tomcat Development Service.

      • Java SDK: version 1.5.0_04

        We kept this at the same level as everywhere else to maintain compatibility.

      • JBoss: version 4.0.3 SP1

        This was installed, but not made active. It is a long-standing request to have a J2EE application server (which includes Tomcat for web apps), but the complexity of setting it up for a learning environment was too much to handle for the break. Since it would interfere with our existing mechanisms for Tomcat in standalone form, we decided to just install it, and, if there is still interest, to try to figure it out during the remainder of the academic year.

      • JDBC: various versions

        The JDBC drivers for the mysql, SQL Server 2000, Oracle, DB2, and Firebird DBMSes were updated to their latest versions and made available to Tomcat web apps.

      • ant: version 1.6.5

      • Firebird: version 1.5.2

4. Teaching and Research Labs (TARLs)

   The latest (12 Dec 2005) Windows critical security updates were applied.

   In the IAI Lab, support for the new TCSS458 Computer Graphics course was added.