Project Initiatives and Highlights
Again, most initiatives happened in the Emerging Technologies space during the past year. Initiatives and projects have become much more focused and streamlined, and have their respective "production homes" in other areas of ASET as well as ITS. Much of ET's mission is to investigate new information technologies to determine how and if further investigation and/or prototyping is warranted. The projects noted below reflect ET's primary efforts during 2005 - 2006.
Animation, Rendering, and 3-D Modeling
eAuthentication Federation
Federated Identity Management
Handheld Platforms
LionShare Security Architecture
Next Generation Wireless
SIP and VOIP Integration
Storage Solutions
Social Software
Windows Vista Beta Testing
THON Video Multicast
Animation, Rendering, and 3-D Modeling
ET's ongoing dialogue with personnel in the College of Arts and Architecture yielded several initiatives during 2005-06. One result includes the addition of the Interdisciplinary Digital Studio (IDS) major, which will be offered in the spring 2007 semester. The college has requested that the industry-standard RenderMan remote rendering be available for the IDS rollout. ET staff are currently working with staff in this college to test the render farm with a production-load workout. Meanwhile, ET staff are working with Classroom and Lab Computing staff to ensure that the software requested for IDS is clarified and thoroughly tested beforehand, and to determine how the render farm will be best managed once it becomes a production service.
Currently, RenderMan's RAT Tools software is installed on one of the Stuckeman Lab Maya workstations, for use and evaluation by faculty and staff. ET staff are working with the college's technical support group to make this technology available.
Educational Technology Services (ETS), within Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT), has been making tentative initiatives in the 3-D modeling arena. As a result, ET staff are actively participating in a support and advisory role via their biweekly meetings.
ET has developed and delivered a well-received, three-part seminar titled "The Digital Arts Toolkit," and will be offering it again.
eAuthentication Federation
Penn State participated in a pilot along with University of Washington, Cornell University, and University of Maryland in Baltimore County, to join the federal government's eAuthentication Federation. The goal of the pilot was to determine the gap, if any, of the federal government requirements and practices in higher education related to identity management. The largest gap discovered was related to business and operating rules. As a result, the higher education community is now participating in an initiative to create interoperability between the eAuthentication and InCommon federations. The goal is to demonstrate this interoperability using National Science Foundation's (NSF) FastLane at the Fall 2006 Internet2 Member Meeting.
Please refer to the New, Improved, and Continued section of this report for more information and associated activities.
More information about eAuthentication is found at http://www.cio.gov/eauthentication/.
Federated Identity Management
Federated identity is a key component of identity management and a strategic direction for Penn State. Recent legislation and regulations have increased the interest in and requirement for privacy for the user community. Federated identity allows Penn State to share information about users across institutional boundaries in a privacy-protected and auditable way. Penn State is a member of InCommon, a federation established for higher education and research institutions. More information about the InCommon federation is found at http://www.incommonfederation.org/. On a related note, ET's Renee Shuey serves as co-chair of the InCommon Technical Advisory Committee. She also is a member of a national business and policy working group for federation interoperability.
Handheld Platforms
The Handheld Project shifted gears slightly this year to accommodate increased interest and use of handheld devices at the University. More resources were put into production-style support for efforts previously regarded as test or proof-of-concept systems. This change necessitated increased coordination with ITS Help Desk staff. In addition, a committee was organized to discuss what options were available in the event of a BlackBerry service shutdown in light of the lawsuit that was pending against the Research In Motion (RIM) corporation at the time. Beneficiaries of those efforts include professors and administrators from the Eberly College of Science, the College of Health and Human Development, the Office of Public Information, the College of Liberal Arts, the Schreyer’s Honors College, Penn State York, and Penn State Altoona.
Despite the increase in support, experimental efforts continued: 1) a NotifyLink server was created and tested; and 2) a proof-of-concept was developed for delivering ANGEL data to a handheld device.
Lastly, efforts were made to coordinate the development of handheld services within ITS. A committee was formed to discuss the experiences by various ITS groups and individuals in the area of handheld devices, and to determine the goals necessary to better serve all constituents at the University.
LionShare Security Architecture
LionShare 1.0 was released in October, 2005 as a preview for the
Penn State community. Based on feedback from 1.0, the LionShare team
made several enhancements and released LionShare 1.1, an ITS production-level service, in June, 2006.
In November, 2005, staff members of ET and TLT visited Oxford
University in Great Britain to assist in Oxford's deployment of a test
LionShare network.
- SASL-CA
Staff in ET developed the SASL-CA, a key security component of LionShare. The SASL-CA allows institutions with different authentication and directory services to generate a common authentication credential for use in LionShare. Credentials obtained from the SASL-CA can be used with a Shibboleth Identity Provider (IdP), allowing authorization based on federated attributes in a LionShare network. Design work is underway to make the SASL-CA a generic credential conversion service for uses outside of LionShare. - Shibboleth IdP Plugin
A plug-in was developed for the Shibboleth IdP Attribute Authority servlet. The plug-in accepts requests from LionShare clients and returns a SAML 1.1 Attribute Assertion containing attributes about the user making the request. ET staff worked closely with several members of Internet2's Shibboleth team for a security review of the LionShare security model.
Next Generation Wireless
ET continued their active involvement with the ITS Wireless Committee and its preparation for the rollout of 802.1X. For additional information, refer to the Networking information found in the New, Improved, and Continued section of this annual report.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Voice over IP (VoIP) Integration
This year, ET partnered with Telecommunications and Networking Services (TNS) to investigate the feasibility of using a SIP client, a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony and instant messaging, on a personal computer or handheld device in order to deliver and receive calls utilizing the existing VoIP infrastructure.
Storage Solutions
ET's investigations of storage solutions advanced on two fronts again this year: block I/O over Internet Protocol (IP) networks and enterprise file systems
Using two network interfaces on the Penn State Integrated Backbone, ET staff were able to replicate files in real-time via Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) technology. These tests included equipment from several storage, network, and Fibre Channel switch vendors. Testing will continue in conjunction with Digital Library Technologies (DLT) to verify if this can be used as a real-time storage or database backup solution. ET and AIT continue to use iSCSI protocol equipment to provide magnetic tape block I/O over existing IP networks rather than new dedicated fiber. Copies of vital backup information are written to a remotely-located tape storage device to insure data redundancy as part of an overall storage disaster recovery plan. Both iSCSI and FCIP may become integral parts of a business continuity plan for ET, as well as other ITS units.
On the file system front, ET continued to track and assist the development of the OpenAFS enterprise file system. ET has provided hardware to the OpenAFS community for AIX debugging and for building Solaris packages. These resources were used for ongoing development on AIX, including large file support debugging. Furthermore, the official Solaris 10/SPARC binaries were built on Penn State hardware.
Social Software
ET continues to investigate the use of software, in particular Web-enabled software, to facilitate collaboration, communication, and the creation of online communities. Efforts were made to integrate various Open Source social software packages with the existing ITS authentication and authorization infrastructure via WebAccess, Shibboleth, and LDAP.
ET's cLog group blogging software, which is in use as ET's "unofficial" SlashET Weblog, has been deployed in several other places. cLog is Weblogging software designed to support enterprise
authentication and a robust group-based authorization system. It continues to be developed by ET staff and is licensed under the
Apache 2.0 Open Source license. In addition to its use for SlashET, it is now being ported to zLinux to serve as the Administrative Information Services (AIS) eCommerce Weblog. Recent enhancements include
a flexible custom RSS generator, updated XHTML/CSS templates and LDAP
integration. Work is currently underway to port the code to Java and
add features such as user-generated Folksonomy Tags and integration with the Penn State WebAccess and Shibboleth Java filters.
Windows Vista Beta Testing
Microsoft is planning to release a new version of their Windows desktop operating system, called Windows Vista, which will be a replacement for Windows XP. ET, along with other ITS staff has been working with Microsoft in their official Technical Beta program. As a result, the Windows Vista Task Force was created in March 2006. Presentations about Windows Vista Beta Testing were shared at the Network of People meeting on May 17, and the ITS all staff meeting on June 28, and a subcommittee was tasked with developing a communications plan, which has been completed and presented to ITS senior management. The plan includes plans for presentations at ITS events, presence on the Web (e.g. http://its.psu.edu/headsup/), and developing articles for publication. More information is available at https://wiki.et-test.psu.edu/index.php/Vista_Impressions.
Thon Video Multicast
For the second consecutive year, ET worked with THON to provide a videocast of the Penn State Dance Marathon. ET partnered with the Colleges of Communications and Information Sciences and Technology (IST) to make this event available with a high-bandwidth multicast throughout the Penn State and Internet2 networks; a high-bandwidth stream to the children, their families, and staff at the Penn State Children's Hospital, located at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center; low-bandwidth Webcasts, which could be viewed almost anywhere on the Internet; and a channel on the University Park Campus Cable television system. The multicast also was captured and archived.