I have some clients' sites on www1, but could happily move them.  I can't think of an argument for keeping them there; I'm sure most clients would gladly go to a name.umn.edu domain instead of their current www1.umn.edu/name.

(though I'm sure, now that I said this, someone would surprise me…)

Kris


Kristofer D. Layon
Director of Web Design & Online Collaboration
- - - - - - 
Office of the Senior Vice President for System Academic Administration
University of Minnesota Twin Cities

On Jan 26, 2010, at 4:11 PM, Peter Wiringa wrote:

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