IT Development/Progress meetings/Agenda 7 January 2014/Tom Report

This is a report of my activities up to this meeting, and some comments on further proposals.

QRpedia

The QRpedia transfer happened shortly before Xmas, without any major hitches (once the domains had been transferred - which is always a lengthy process). In early January some problems were reported with HTTPS access which I worked on pretty much immediately - in the process this briefly broke the other websites (wiki, blog, etc.) for around 3 or 4 minutes.

This work identified the need for a QRpedia SSL certificate, as currently https://qrpedia.org shows a warning message in many browsers; tracked as bug 162

VLE

Summary; after extensive work in December I eeked out as much performance as I can from the current install. The next step is to discover the hardware requirements from the use of the system - including a proposal to move the MySQL databases from each server to a dedicated instance. Further work is now dependent on work by Charles and Doug in identifying the feasibility of an upgrade (e.g. fixing the skins & updating the course format).

ipv6

In December I was asked to implement ipv6 on all of our servers. The servers have an ipv6 address and it was simply nginx that requires configuration. I began that process but spent time on QRpedia rather than finishing it. I can fit in a couple of hours in January to finish that work.

Monitoring

We need a full monitoring solution. Sensu is a free solution - but needs some configuring. It would probably take about 2 of my days to get set up. But it's fairly critical so I recommend doing it.

Other

The servers received several updates/fixes during the previous month or two. These were all routine and I completed them successfully.