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.

To ease the transition for our users, we have devised a way to allow two web servers to co-exist on the same machine.  (Geek aside: to do this, we’re using Apache’s reverse proxy directive, ProxyPass).  Our current plan is to put the PHP 5 -based server into production on Wednesday, April 23 at 5:00 PM; we will continue to keep the old server running so that any sites which have problems under PHP 5 can continue to run until their code is fixed.

In most cases, code that works with PHP 4 should work with PHP 5, but there are exceptions.  We know that the development framework LSCR has been using for our web team’s internally-developed applications (such as our department directory, news+events system, and course listings) does not work under PHP 5; we are in the process of migrating our code to the Zend framework.  If you are one of our web customers, we will be contacting you about migrating your department’s applications to the new framework.

If you are managing your own PHP code, or your own installation of a PHP tool like WordPress or drupal, it might be a good idea to test your code on our development server, which is already running PHP 5, sometime before April 23.  Mail sysadmin@LS if you’d like to get set up on the development server.

If you do nothing, your site will be migrated on April 23, and it’s possible that it will work just fine, but we would recommend that you check and test for problems.  Most problems should be minor and quickly fixable; if you have major problems after the migration, contact sysadmin@LS and we can temporarily put your site back on the old server to give you time to deal with the issues.

Many L&S academics are still using socrates, usually as a place for simple web hosting for their individual or lab home pages.  It does not appear that there will be a simple migration path for those users; IST’s announcement of the abatement, and the lack of a clear migration path, generated a lively discussion on the campus Micronet mailing list.

In response, IST will be holding a Socrates Customer Forum on  Tuesday, April 8, at 10:00 AM in Sibley Auditorium (Bechtel Engineering Center).  If you are invested in web hosting or other services provided on socrates, especially web hosting, it may behoove you to attend that forum.

If you simply need to be able to use a Unix command line, there are probably reasonable alternatives for you; Mac OS X is a full Unix environment, and if you use Windows you can install the Cygwin environment to be able to work in a Unix-like way.

The final version of PHP 4, version 4.4.8, was released in January and was recently installed on our main web server. The PHP development team has committed to providing security patches for 4.4.8 until this August; after August, using PHP 4 will be a violation of the campus minimum security standards. That situation gives us a fairly hard deadline for migration, and we’d like to be migrated well before then.

We have set up a development web server running Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.5 to allow departments to test their sites with PHP 5. Contact sysadmin@LS if you are interested in getting set up on the development server.

Our target date for cutting over to PHP 5 will be May 1, 2008. At that time, we’ll put PHP 5 in production on our main server, and any of your PHP code which is incompatible with PHP 5 will break. I expect that most sites will continue to work fine, with perhaps some small glitches, but it’s impossible to know unless you test your code beforehand.

We’ll be sending more communications about this change-over as it approaches.

Due to the aging of the technology, AWS is going to be replaced by Central Authentication Service (CAS); the tentative date for the deprecation of AWS is December 31, 2008. Moving from AWS to CAS will require some changes to all the applications currently using AWS; the changes should be fairly simple to implement.

The biggest advantage of CAS is that it provides single sign-on to all applications using CAS; that is, once you’ve logged on through CAS once, if you visit another web site which uses CAS, you won’t have to retype your password. This will be a boon for most users, especially those coming in through AirBears who’ll have to use CAS to get on the network in the first place.

If you have an application that’s currently using AWS, you should look at the links above to start working on migrating to CAS. Both services will run in parallel for at least the rest of this year; you can move to CAS at any time. It probably makes sense to move sooner rather than later, since CAS provides better functionality.