Project Proposals for project period Jan to April 2011

Development of new computing services by the computing staff is scheduled in project periods (three per year). The next project period starts in January 2011 and the process of prioritising which projects will be resourced starts now (end Nov).

Please add your proposed project to the following table, completing the Title, Description and Proposer fields. You may wish to create a new wiki topic for your description. If you wish to lend support for an existing project, add your name to the Supporter(s) field. Computing staff may respond to the proposals in the Computing staff comments field.

Title	Description	Proposer	Supporter(s)	Computing staff comments
Build DIR machine	With EPCC, build, test and manage the DIR (Data Intensive Research) machine (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/190)	mpa
Virtualised DICE image scoping exercise	Investigate how we could deliver a virtualised DICE platform (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/172)	MPU unit
Scientific Linux 6 port	Upgrade LCFG platform to Scientific Linux 6 (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/131)	MPU unit
Taught course infopages	Autogenerated information pages for all taught courses that carry a basic minimum of course information (less than the administrative descriptor in the EUCLID course catalogue) and link onward to the actual course websites. This is distinct from course-in-a-box, and I have spoken with Neil Brown and Roger Burroughs.	stark
Improved bug tracking tool	Provide an improved bug tracking tool for use by the School https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/183	Services Unit
Port to apacheconf	port websites currently using the apache component to use apacheconf (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/184)	Services Unit
Migrate wiki to central service	Move the contents of the Scool wiki to the Confluence central service (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/185)	Services Unit
Migration of AFS data	Migrate all AFS RW volumes downtown and reorganise storage to allow widespread deployment of RAID10 (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/186)	Services Unit
Prometheus main project and necessary sub-projects	Main Prometheus project and sub-projects necessary to complete and bring into service full account lifecycle management (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/75, https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/182, https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/187, https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/188, https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/169)	Infrastructure Unit
Nagios enhancements	Enhancements and upgrades to the nagios system monitoring system (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/125)	Infrastructure Unit
KDC rekey	Re-key our kerberos KDCs to use more modern encryption types by default (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/180)	Infrastructure Unit
OpenLDAP upgrade	We're running a very old version of OpenLDAP on our servers, and should be upgrading. (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/181)	Infrastructure Unit
Further AFS development and automation	(https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/135)		Infrastructure Unit
Account reconciliation	A general overhawl/reconciliation of account details is required (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/182)	CEG
ERA/PR	Is there something we could do to help with the perceived short comings/delays of Publications Repository/ERA (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/189)	services unit		This would probably be sub project of the existing " move www.inf to new technology" project
wallet enhancements	Enhancements to the wallet key and certificate store (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/174)	Infrastructure Unit		Depends on Prometheus completion
Prometheus enhancements	Enhancements to the Prometheus account management system, as enumerated in the project description (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/179)	Infrastructure Unit		Depends on the main Prometheus projects completing
Scanning for compromised machines	Set up a system which would perform regular network scans, looking for exported services with known compromises or misconfigurations (https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/103)	Infrastructure Unit		The IS project which was supposed to have provided this service didn't produce anything and is now no more.

If a project is considered to be feasible, a member of computing staff will contact the proposer in order to flesh out the proposal (eg outline a plan of work, cost the project etc) in order that the project proposal can be prioritised against other projects.

The deadline for submitting a project for this period is 1st December.

-- AlastairScobie - 22 Nov 2010