Web hosting services at CERN Alex Lossent – CERN IT/IS Hepix Fall 2005

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent2 Agenda  Presentation of the service  Demo  Service infrastructure  Recent achievements  Future

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent3 Agenda  Presentation of the service  Demo  Service infrastructure  Recent achievements  Future

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent4 CERN Web Services  Mandate  Provide a managed infrastructure for CERN users to publish web content  Provide users with authoring and publishing tools  Reduce “locally (un-)managed” web servers  CERN IT/IS Group (mail, Windows environment)  3 tasks  Operate the central web hosting infrastructure  Provide self-service site management interface  User support

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent5 Figures  Infrastructure  25 production servers  Hosting > 7000 web sites  Serving ~ 2’000’000 requests/day  People  Helpdesk provides 1 st & 2 nd level support  1.5 “FTE”  Students and associates

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent6 CERN Web Services  Self-service site management interface  On-line documentation  Site creation, deletion  Management of permissions & access restrictions  Management of site & folder properties  script/CGI execution  Visibility (internal/world-visible)  Require HTTPS 

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent7 Demo  Self-service site creation

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent8 Agenda  Presentation of the service  Demo  Service infrastructure  Recent achievements  Future

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent9 Service infrastructure  Windows (2003 Server) + Linux (SLC3)  Runs on top of CERN’s Windows & Linux server environment  Monitoring, HW/SW maintenance  Different server roles  Hosting servers (11)  Gateways to distributed file systems (4)  Infrastructure support (6)  redirectors, administration, search engine  “Customized” hosting servers (5)

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent10 Service infrastructure: search  Intranet search engine  Allows searching of intranet-only sites  Only content that is accessible anonymously  1’000’000 documents, 5000 queries/day  Currently using Inktomi indexing engine  Will move to FastSearch (??)  Demo

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent11 Support for web applications  Various technologies are provided for web application development  ASP, ASP.NET, Perl, PHP  Supported on central Hosting Servers  Databases: MS Access, Oracle (IT/DES)  AFS folders: PHP, CGI (Perl etc.)  Java/servlet web application hosting  Operated by IT/DES  Access control with NICE accounts/groups

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent12 Authoring  Supported authoring software  Frontpage 2003, Dreamweaver  Visual Studio.NET for ASP.NET applications  Several ways for authors to access site files  Direct file access  WebDAV  Web interface  FPSE

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent13 User recommendations  Recommended technologies are:  Centrally hosted web sites  Authoring with FrontPage 2003  Dynamic content with ASP (VBScript)  Efforts focused on supporting that environment  Also supported: Dreamweaver  Static content

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent14 About URLs  Web sites are published as  This is translated to  Why?  Many web sites & servers  No virtual hosting so as to support HTTPS  Web sites are 1 st -level folders of a physical web server  Web server’s name abstracted with DNS alias  “Web redirectors” are in charge of the translation  Flexible implementation for integration of non-central sites  Support for external DNS names

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent15 Web redirectors Web browser Redirectors Web servers Redirect Web namespace DNS zones

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent16 Agenda  Presentation of the service  Demo  Service infrastructure  Recent achievements  Future

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent17 Migration to Windows2003  Many improvements over Windows2000  Simple “upgrade” was not possible  Tedious migration task  Transparent for users

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent18 Support for PHP  Popular technology  Many useful applications already exist  PhpBB, wikis…  PHP4  A few problems  Bugs in the Windows port  No version upgrades on SLC, only security fixes  Version compatibility

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent19 Java/servlet web hosting  Provide a central service and limit “locally managed” servers  Service operated by IT/DES  Tomcat 5.5, EJB not supported  Multi-hosting with site isolation  Integrated with central web services  Managed from the same web interface  NICE authentication  Production since September 05  ~10 production applications + test/dev  half migrated from existing servers  5 servers allow ~200 applications

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent20 New webservices site  Consistent look & usage with other IT/IS services  Technology upgrade  ASP.NET/SOAP vs. ASP/VB6  Complete documentation rewrite  Simpler, easier access to some features  Security

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent21 Agenda  Presentation of the service  Demo  Service infrastructure  Recent achievements  Future

10-Oct-2005Alex Lossent22 What’s next?  Web-hosted collaboration tools  “e-groups”: forum, mailing list, news, shared workspace for file exchange…  Sharepoint, WWF, custom solution?  Support for authentication with certificates  Improved search engine  Support for “External users”