Summer 2013 Science day: illuminating chemistry Data, calculation and experiment Athena Swan accreditation achieved Keeping the IT systems operational As I see it... Tim Dickens leads the IT team within the chemistry department, having joined from GlaxoSmithKline five years ago. He tells Sarah Houlton about the problems the computer officers face, some of the current projects they’re working on – and what they do all day! A large and complex department rewriting War and Peace , the support like chemistry must have huge IT request should include all the relevant demands. Can you give us some information. You’d be amazed how numbers? often we get requests that simply say, For starters, we have about 800 users on ‘My computer doesn’t work!’. A site, plus at least 700 other collaborators description of a few symptoms go a with IT access. All take up disk space and long way to helping us diagnose the support resources, generating work for problem. Also, please don’t put multiple the Computer Officer (CO) team. We requests on the same ticket as they may have 100TB of secure storage, replicated need to go to different people and thus in two different locations, to ensure that might get lost in the system, and for any we don’t lose important data if a disk particular problem please keep replying fails, and then back-up to a safe third to the same ticket with follow-up infor - location. That’s on top of more than 200 mation to keep it all together. servers in house. We encourage people not store criti - t t We’re supporting several different cal data on their local machine. The file i P operating systems – four versions of server is the place to store this informa - n a h Windows, various Mac OSs plus Linux, tion. While we can be very sympathetic t a N and then there’s the phone system, which if your laptop is lost, or stolen from the : o t is internet-based. People are also, increas - Panton Arms, there’s not much we can o h ingly, using mobile devices such as iPads do if you haven’t kept an up-to-date P and Android phones, and we need to thousands of pounds– or more – to copy of your data on a server. boost our wireless capabilities. Last year replace. That can be challenging. we received 3700 support requests, or What about the department- tickets, and we’re always particularly How do you know if there’s a specific applications – what do busy at the start of the academic year. problem? these include? We’ve also disposed of 15 tonnes of We’ve implemented a system we call There is a departmental system built on obsolete IT equipment in the past year, Hobbit that electronically monitors IT a relational database, so every piece of and upgraded much of the department’s components – there’s even a website data is ‘atomic’ for storing most of our networking infrastructure, mostly at where people can check it out themselves administration data. If you change a weekends and early in the morning to the status of the key services that we offer. telephone number in one place, it will avoid inconveniencing people. The aim is to gain a good insight into change everywhere, and if someone how everything is working. For example, changes their name after they get mar - What’s involved in keeping the if the network routing wasn’t working or ried, say, that will change everywhere, infrastructure running? the department firewall was out, they too. We use a very similar technology for One aspect is ensuring all the backups would go red on the Hobbit system. We exam marks processing, and the depart - happen overnight and, if they don’t, fol - can then look into the situation, and find mental website also picks up informa - low up to find out what happened. We out what is making the item fail. We want tion directly from the admin database. manage more than 1000 desktop com - to detect any service-threatening events We have recently developed a bench puters on top of those 200 servers, so before they become service-affecting. list manager for managing desk space that’s a lot of software updates to apply! We have done our best to configure and fume hoods, which is currently We’ve built several automated installa - the whole IT infrastructure in a resilient being populated with data, and an in- tion systems so we can install software manner, so if a service fails on one house ‘dropbox’ service so important much more quickly with less interven - machine it can be moved over to another data isn’t backed up and shared on tion by the computer officers, and also machine, either automatically or manu - potentially risky external cloud services. set machines in a consistent fashion. We ally, to keep the service running. It’s a bit This is a service we hope to launch to also respond to hardware failures. like a duck on a pond – it may look users later this year. A problem we’ve faced quite a bit in serene but underneath the surface there is the past couple of years is responding to a lot going on, and when there’s a system I’ve seen your project planning power glitches. We get a lot of these, one failure the computer officers paddle hard system with all its post-it notes – way or another, and it can lead to com - to keep everything working and avoid it’s not very hi-tech! What’s puters overheating and failing, and we users being impacted. it for? may have to replace disk drives or even As well as the day-to-day support and motherboards as a result. Every time What about the support system? upkeep of the systems, we work on there is a power failure we can lose a Well, when people send a ticket to many other projects, and the way we week or more of project work recover - [email protected], it is queued up keep track of them is by moving ing from the mess it generates! Hence in and triaged by Dave Pratt, who moves it coloured post-it notes from the list of the last 12 months we have invested in into the right queue so the best person everything we want to do into the pri - the intallation of uninterruptable power to solve that problem will receive it. The ority list, and then into the ‘done’ sec - supply infrastructure for our most criti - centralised system is much more effec - tion when they’re finished. Once a year cal systems. tive than everyone sending emails to we have a ritual clearing of the board We also have to maintain some very individuals. Avoiding the ticket system and start again. It’s amazing how much old and obsolete computers, required to won’t move your problem to the front we take off the done side! ­ run instruments that would cost tens of of the queue! Importantly, without continued on page 12 2 Chem@Cam Summer 2013 Reluctant reactions Letters Glowing chemistry a Yale professor who had been looking for evi - dence of some kind of evolution of eChem@Cam Dear Editor, DNA/RNA in primitive life forms investigated The cover picture on the Spring 2013 issue of a rare sponge, Cryptotethia crypta , and discov - Chem@Cam is now being sent out by email to Chem@Cam reminded me of my school days ered unusual materials he could not identify those who have asked for a pdf version rather at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle, but named ‘spongouridine’ and ‘spongo - than a hard copy in the mail. where we used similar chemicals to produce a thymidine’ on the basis of their UV If you would like to swap your paper magazine blue colour – but the solutions ran through spectra. By good fortune, the spongo uridine for an e-version, then please send an email with three (parallel) paths through the letters ‘RGS’ sample he sent to Alex Todd proved to be the subject line ‘eChem@Cam’ to to produce a beautiful effect most of the time. identical to a product which Dan had recently [email protected], and we’ll start to send you It was, however, a pain to set up, as all of the made in a failed attempt to convert uridine to the mag electronically from the next issue. Don’t individual flows had to be adjusted so you got deoxyuridine. He had inverted the 2’- forget to tell us your postal address so we can three blue letters, not just a bright blue sink! hydroxyl group and made uracil arabinoside. check that the correct person is being removed David Thompson Werner was delighted to get an immediate from the mailing list for the paper magazine. positive identification and begged Alex to send If you’re not sure what it will look like, you can Of Brown and Todd him ‘one of his bright young postdocs’ to check out e-back issues at www.ch.cam.ac.uk work with him. Rather to my surprise, I was Dear Editor, chosen with the ‘warning’ that I would have to There I taught chemistry for nine years and When I read in your last issue about the death be prepared to spend a month or two each was then invited to become the senior tutor of Dan Brown (which sadly I had not heard of year collecting sponges in the Caribbean! (with a limited teaching load) and, after a fur - earlier), a flood of reminiscences of my six Tragically, Werner, who had been unwell ther 12 years, university registrar.