My brief input, following from both Gabe and Andre, is basically a
"me too," too. I've sent some comments off list to Patton about some
of our particular needs.
The big, big thing we'd like to see: MySQL hosting. We have a RHEL
virtual machine with OIA right now, which will be the replacement
for an ancient server in our closet. Since we could host our
databases on the VM we had to pay for, rather than pay $15/DB more
to continue hosting with JaWS, we elected to move ours. We'd prefer
a centrally managed DB service for this, but it works just fine. To
some extent, we have almost too much control with our VM, and are in
a position where a small staff that has a lot of breadth, but not a
great deal of depth (or real redundancy) in system administration,
would rather go with a standard offering and contract for any
necessary time by real sys admins to do a bit more work. It's not
much, but we worry about operational continuity. A more restricted
VM might meet our needs very well.
Andre's cPanel note is about a +10 for me.
A bigger issue for University Relations is having a plan for the
future of the 'the' web hotel (www1.umn.edu). Are any other groups
still hosting content on www1? Architectural and infrastructure
decisions that go back to the early or mid 90s have left the
centralmost web hosting in an interesting state. Look at almost any
other institution out their, higher ed or corporate, and their
equivalent to (www.)umn.edu is their home page, in the realm of
marketing. Because central auth, people search, and other services
reside on www.umn.edu, other traffic is passed over to www1.
Basically, the central marketing space at the University has been
co-opted for technical reasons, and it's a bigger issue we'd like to
see resolved, though it could understandably take years to unwind.
Again, anyone else on www1? What are you plans? Anyone from OIT able
to share anything on this?
--
Peter Wiringa
Electronic Communications
University Relations
University of Minnesota
(612) 625-3252
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"I gotta hold on to my angst. I preserve it because I need it. It
keeps me sharp, on the edge, where I gotta be." - V. Hanna
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