Practical Web Management Christopher Gutteridge IWMW 2009

Christopher Gutteridge?  Full time webmaster/manager for Southampton Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) since 1997  ECS has  Webteam of 3(ish)  10 Infrastructure webservers running 310 sites.  100 research webservers.

Find out what's actually going on Work out what you are supposed to be doing Fix what's not working Expand and optimize what's working Improve ways of knowing what's going on …repeat until promoted

1.Know what's going on 2.Have a plan 3.Be pragmatic

What does an IWManager do? Same as anyone at a University should be doing! Doing or Facilitating:  Teaching  Research  Communication of Research via  Publications (and websites)  Events  Working with Industry

Where we were failing  Losing research output  sites "go away" or software bit-rots  Dropping the ball on basic requests  Not shutting down broken unloved sites  Finding out about issues via user reports  Not knowing what software we're running  Wiki's, blogs etc.  Unable to perform basic security patches  Team not sharing information  Not knowing who owns a website

Solutions to Problems Technology, Policy & Culture

Problem: Dropping the ball  Basic tasks:  Create a new website  Create a MySQL DB  Set up a wiki  Set up a blog  Correct an error on a page

Solution: Dropping the Ball  Identify standard essential tasks  Create simple web forms for each  Ask all the questions in one go  Manage expectations  Web form submits to a queue  Shared web account  Task management system  DON’T NEGLECT THIS QUEUE  Create scripts!

Research Communication  Most Researchers only think as far as the next funding bid.  It's our problem!  We provide continuity  Better to plan from the start, than pick up the pieces after each project ends.  Or worse, let it rot.

Problems of Preserving Research Output  Website maintenance  patching wikis and blog software  Web 2.0 sites (Flickr, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, Slideshare)  Orgs I.P. beyond your control  Short term/external DNS registrations  Conferences and Projects  Costs  Moving sites

Soloution: Maintaining Tools  Provide central blog & wiki services  Plan how to "fossilise" dynamic sites  Encourage use of central services and wiki/blog software suitable for fossilising.

Solution: Offsite Content  Blogs  Provide hosted blog service  Wordpress is a good choice  Twitter  No best practice yet

Solution: Offsite Content  Youtube, Slideshare, Flickr  Encourage staff to also deposit this content in the IR (Institutional Repository)  Make the IR provide the cool features that have driven users to use external tools

Embeddable slide-shows and streaming video coming soon to…

Solutions: DNS Registrations  Web team registers domains for projects, requiring X years payment in advance  At least 3 years beyond end of project  Conferences maybe 10 years or more  Good use for a request form  Monitor DNS entry for each website

Problem: Who owns a site?  Whom to forward queries to  Trying to shut unwanted sites down  To see where resources are being used  Who to bill about DNS  Security Issues

Solution: Website Database  Built from comments in apache config.  #meta owner=cjg23r,dsc93  #meta type=project  Script to build webpage report periodically  Join against your list of current users to see when a site is a candidate for deletion.  Keep config. files in version control  Generate useful reports

Discovering webservers  Ask the firewall manager about port 80  Virtual Servers are causing a proliferation!

Problem: Waiting for complaints  Unprofessional  Hard to manage workload  Often would have been easier to fix earlier

Solution: Build a batcomputer  Nagios is a good starting place  Needs to be actively looked after  Usually "champion" moves on and it rots  Monitor failures and uptime

What to Monitor…  PING  HTTP & HTTPS  Hardware (Disks failing etc.)  Backups  HTTP from external site  HTTPS Certificate expiry  MySQL Servers  Rivals?

Uptime  Monitor your webserver uptime  Monitor things beyond your control which make it unavailable  External connectivity  Building power  Don't bother getting your uptime (much) higher than the things beyond your control!

Some Benefits of Monitoring  You and your team know what's going on  Fix problems before they cause harm (nobody will call you a hero anymore)  Uptime graphs help make pragmatic decisions, and justify them  Provide management with facts and figures about what you do

Standardisation Fever  Standard solutions are Good  Enforced standardisation can be very Bad  One Size does not always fit all!

Summary  Don't try and be a hero  Find out what's going on  Know where your job is  Have a plan  Build a Batcomputer