1. Usage in June 2003 Summary A Popular Web Server for Astronomy Education in China Chenzhou CUI, Yongheng ZHAO National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences Advantages of Internet Education Various forms: web page, forum, chat room, BBS, etc. Multimedia: text, picture, audio, video, etc. Real time: news, instant message, real video, etc. Wide audience: no limit on age, sex, nation and … Convenient access: no limit on time and place Difficulties Facing Astronomy Education in China Absence of educator: Astronomy does not appear in school curriculum. Absence of Chinese resources: Only one open-published magazine for astronomy education and popularization in Chinese mainland. Quite a part of existing materials are out of date. Construction of education website is difficult: Free web space is becoming less and less. Advertisements from commercial free web space providers are boring. Mission and goals To provide high quality free web space service to individuals and organizations to construct astronomy education websites: super-large space high stability To make the web server the first choice for Chinese astronomy education websites, to let the server hold the most abundant Chinese astronomy education resources, to improve teaching and learning of astronomy in China. Services provided to users 500 MB webpage space Specific domain name for each user SSH + SFTP ports connection MySQL + phpMyAdmin DBMS service PHP script language support Security Server access: SSH+SFTP connection File security: Special user privilege set. User of the server can only access his own files. Data security: Disk to disk backup periodically by shell scripts. Future Plans Upgrade of software and hardware: To give opportunity for more users To enhance service items: ASP, Servlet support To improve quality of service Automated data backup and management: RAID 1+0 To improve the efficiency of user management Summary The web server has become an important resource for astronomy education in China and a window of NAOC on public education. Sponsored by National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) and Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) project. Server Configuration Hardware system It’s really a very common personal computer. Software System All software is open source packages. 3Com PCI 3c905C Seagate ST380021A (80GB)+ ST317242A (17GB) 1 GBASUS P4BIntel Pentium 4 CPU 1.60GHz NICHard Disk MemoryMain board CUP AWStats 5.5PHP 4.2.2MySQL 3.23.51 +phpMyAdmin2.5.1 Apache 1.3.26 Red Hat Linux release 7.3 Logfile Analyzer Script Language DBMSWWW Server OS Usage Statistics User profession statistics Up to July 7th, over 60% of the 78 website owners on the server are students, including secondary level school students and college students. They learn much about astronomy by maintaining their websites and share their knowledge with others. Unique visitors Number of visits PagesHitsBandwidth175837 269143 (1.53 visits per visitor) 2656873 (9.87 pages per visit) per visit) 13571524 (50.42 hits per visit) 118.53 GB (461.79 KB per visit) Hits vs. Days On June 17th, network service of NAOC's ISP had been broken for half a day. The lowest peak occurs on Tuesday, most people are concentrating themselves on study and work, while the second lowest peak occurred on Sunday is because of people are enjoying their weekend. Hits vs. Hours Visits reach peak at evening. The lowest peak occurs at early morning, because most people go to bed. Two other low peaks occur at lunchtime and suppertime, i.e. 12 and 18.