Revised plans for socrates
As I noted in a blog post back in March, IST is ending support for socrates. Since that posting, I have been participating on the Socrates/Arachne Abatement Steering Committee, trying to find a way to remove those servers without adversely affecting teaching and research within L&S. I am pleased to note that IST has been responsive to our concerns, and has come up with some plans which should meet the needs of nearly all of our socrates users.
IST’s information about the abatement project is available at http://ist.berkeley.edu/services/tam/serverabatement.html. This project has been dragging on for a while, but now has a fairly aggressive timeline for finally removing those servers. Most importantly, there is a user forum tomorrow (Tuesday, October 21) at 11:00 AM in Sibley Auditorium; if you have any questions or concerns about the abatement and migration projects, it would behoove you to attend and make sure your voice is heard.
The highlights of the new plan are:
- Web hosting will be outsourced to a third-party vendor (Dreamhost). If you currently have a “tilde” account on socrates, and your site is simple HTML, you are eligible for free hosting on the outsourced service. (Most sites on socrates, something like 80% of them, fall into this category).
- Users with more advanced web needs will be able to contract directly with Dreamhost for full-featured web hosting; IST will collaborate with Dreamhost to provide http://hostname.berkeley.edu URLs for your sites. This hosting will be much cheaper than IST’s enterprise-level web hosting; something like $10/month.
- Merrill Shanks of the Social Sciences Computing Lab is developing a plan to provide access for socrates users or class accounts which need access to statistical and mathematical software.
- People who use pine to read email on socrates will be encouraged to migrate to a modern mail client (we recommend the free Thunderbird client). There are also options to use pine on your own desktop computer if you really must. (I recommend against that configuration, for support reasons).
As I write this message, socrates has been down for most of the day for unscheduled maintenance. This highlights the fragile nature of the socrates system, and validates the aggressive timeline IST is pursuing for abating the system. The current plan is to migrate all web users off socrates by December 19; if you are a socrates user, I highly recommend that you migrate as soon as the option is given to you.
Overall, I think this process has produced a result that is likely to be more positive both for IST and for the socrates users. It is unfortunate that it took so long to get to this point, but on balance I am pleased with how IST has responded to our user demands. Direct messages from individual faculty members played a key role in encouraging and helping develop a better solution.
