Master Nerd

Well it’s Project Time here in Residential Computing!

Today I finish the Judicial Project, which is basically a secured online form allowing RAs (Resident Assistants) to submit Incident Reports that is integrated to our CBORD Odyssey System.

It needed a small amount of recoding, but most importantly it got a major face lift from last years version. We took the new NetConnect Stylesheet (most notably used for the WOU NetConnect CD*) and applied it to these new Judicial pages. So most of the RA pages will look and flow the same way, with a few minor exceptions (to be corrected in the not-too-distant future).

With Judicial safely behind us, we can now proceed to the two largest projects left to complete for the summer.

1. The completion of the Judicial project is a larger step than it appears. Because this minor functionality is now working, we can more easily and smoothly implement the New! Online Housing Application for October 1, 2005. As the DB server, and web server are now linked, we can more quickly implement the Online Housing Application. More to come soon.

2. REDWOLF 2, although already in production, is far from complete. Student registration has been steadily increasing over the last 2 weeks, with VERY few issues. Many reports/interfaces/functionality must still be written, but half of the mission-critial processes already exist and are in place. This program will need to have it’s RESIDENT, RESHALL and HELPDESK modules complete before Sep 18. The TELECOM and ADMIN modules need a small amount of work, and the CAMPUS module needs not even to be begun until move-in is completed.

*The WOU NetConnect CD is provided to all student rooms to expedite the student computer registration process. It contains valuable step-by-step information as well as utilites and Sophos Antivirus for all students on campus.

One of the most important skills of any DB (database) programmer, in my opinion, is the ability to design a DB well, correctly and with growth in mind.

Thus far, I’ve been well-pleased with the design of Redwolf 2. It was designed by Paul Lambert and myself. We’ve made a few small additions/modifications for added functionality, but the core of the program seems to be holding together quite well.

I’ve been spending the majority of my time lately re-programming Redwolf 2. It has enhanced security, modularization, cababilities, reporting – and most importantly will be utilized to manage the campus switches in the near future. This will make the program quite powerful, and able to suit the needs of 3+ departments (not to mention managing the ports for ALL departments on campus).

Back to design, I was terrifically pleased by Redwolf 1, which had 3 modules. Redwolf 2, now has 5 modules covering a much wider scope of possiblities and taking advantage of some of the newest technologies we’ve developed (cookie security, iframe/inner-html, dynamic report sorting, Perl script interfacing, SSL, etc…).

I’m very pleased with the way it’s shaping up. However, with Fall Term move-in looming, will I have the time to finish Redwolf 2 and make it the Champion of the World it’s designed to be? Only time will tell….

Sometimes I feel like crying when we have to scuttle and old-but-great program (although I don’t recommend crying on the inside in Oregon due to mildew). However, it is just about time to retire our BigBro program (currently in version 2.1).

This program was designed to view the security cameras on campus in a specific and secure way so that only authorized access would be allowed. BigBro is in it’s third version and all three versions served us well for their particular duration. However, time marches on.

With our most recent upgrade of the camera recording software we use, we were ‘given’ access to use a new feature that allows remote viewing (both live and recorded) as well as export from a browser.

Currently those people around campus, such as building managers, use a modified version of the recording software to view their cameras live. The problem is that we have many versions of this software out there, and I rarely hear about the software unless it’s broken. Also as updates come out, they are not done due to the decentralized nature of that software (among other things).

This new web tool will continue to give us the solid performance we desire, combined with excellent security and flexiblity.

We hope to finish configuring this tool, and begin deploying it before school starts on September 26th. I am currently working with support to finish the configuration and get our testing going.

Once we have finished the testing we can roll out this new web tool, which will replace either the stand-alone old-versioned recording software (mentioned earlier) or will replace BigBro. I’ll be sad to see it go, but am pleased to be able to offer the campus a more powerful and attractive tool at no cost to them.

Today was a very good day in that I finished a project I’ve been working on for a few months. Karen (Dining) asked me to pull the counts of who ate (and how they paid) out of the CBORD server and compile them so that we could project (based on what percentage ate in the past) how many people will be eating in the upcoming weeks.

Well today I’ve finished the project. There is one tiny piece I’m waiting for to safeguard data integrity, but that should be finished this week. Using this program Karen and Julie should be able to more accurately guess how many people will be eating each day – thereby eliminating food and money waste.

Karen was very happy with the results and one of my test pages turned into a report that she loved. Bonus!

This will be the first of many posts explaining what I do, and what I’m working on.

Today’s topic is REDWOLF. Redwolf is an in-house home-grown app that maintains the security for the Residence Halls. During the school year every student machine (or device … aka XBOX) that CAN have access to the WOU network is recorded in Redwolf.

While developing Redwolf, we borrowed some design and programmatic ideas from OSU’s opensource project Maintain. I’ve worked some with Chris White from OSU who does a real similar job to what I do here at Western. I’m greatly benefited from his open-handed generosity and wisdom.

In a nutshell, Redwolf allows us to centrally manage and interact with our 10+ residential switches. Security is used (and has been for the past few years) to prevent access by unauthorized users. It also allows us to find out where a problem machine is. Redwolf also has some built in reports allowing us to take statistics and calculate usage.

Last year, I implemented a new package for Redwolf that allowed students to manage their devices. As residents can only have two registered devices (and only one online at any one time…ever) I found that many students desired to have the ability to change from their computer to their XBOX and back again – without needing our help.

This summer, one of my big projects is to update/reconfigure Redwolf so that it can be submitted (as per Travis’ suggestion) to the OSU OSL (Oregon State University Open Source Lab). The most required upgrade is the re-writing of the residential self-management area allowing simpler, quicker access to this excellent tool.

Redwolf is a feather in our cap (our being Residential Computing). It provides us with the power and flexiblity that our very dynamic environment requires.