MnPALS Technical Services Report: May 2009

System news and work completed

• Installed the latest version 19 service pack on production on May 10, 2009.
• Installed RAM on two servers and moved them to the rack.
• Laboriously working on configuring the new Integrated Gateway Management console server to connect with all servers.
• Removed the web server to old harp.
• Permanently removed the domain name: harp.msus.edu or harp.mnpals.net. Both Concordia College (TRC) and Gustavus Adolphus College (GAC) reported problems after the change to aleph.mnpals.net and were resolved.
• Added EZProxy for Lake Superior College (LSC).
• Loaded April Marcive records for libraries that subscribe to the service.
• Loaded a special Ebrary set of records for Crown College (CWN).
• Loaded NetLibrary records for libraries that subscribed to the collections.
• Attended the Koha Conference in Plano, TX.
• Attended the Cataloging and Acquisitions Users Group workdays.
• ILL requests are working in production between Aleph and VDX for Great River Regional Library and TdS.
• Met with Collier to discuss an enterprise VMware structure and are waiting for quotes from them. Will be setting up a meeting with MSU IT to discuss options and costs to use and access their VMware solution since they already are running it. The discussion will also include options for setting up a cold, warm, or hot site in the basement area of Carkowski Commons where we currently store our backup tapes to deal with failovers. The goal is to have everything moved by August 1, 2009.
• Finished Aleph 300 systems training for Anoop.
• Refreshed the database on dev19. Data is current to the May 2, 2009 production backup.

Work in progress

• Ongoing system maintenance and upgrades.
• Attending Indexing Task Force meetings.
• Attending the PALS Communication Team meetings.
• Attending the Marketing Team meetings.
• Attending the Innovation Team meetings.
• Continuing to work on PALS Support Center tickets.
• Continuing to work with the UNIX system monitoring software. Working with the student systems administration assistant to learn and work with Nagios.
• Continuing to perform weekly updates to the Authority database on the production server.
• Working on SQL reports and services.
• Loading PromptCat records for Minnesota School of Business (MSB).
• Testing the custom program to add the 035 field with the OCLC number to records identified by St. John’s University (SBJ). There are approximately 101,000 records that will get updated.
• Continuing to work on MnPALS Plus and VuFind. Working on priorities from the MnPALS Plus Working Group. Completed a number of background fixes.
• Completed the ILL patron management enhancement in MnPALS Plus and will be moving it to production soon.
• Discovered that ODIN does not authenticate their patrons the way that we do. Completed custom programming to authenticate their patrons that are using the Discovery Tool. They will be working with their campus IT so patrons can use email to send ILL requests from the Discovery Tool to Aleph.
• Preparing to upgrade Solaris on Alto and Tenor. Downtime will be minimal.
• Researched Subversion in order to upgrade CUFTS. Learning Subversion to use with other open source products.
• Upgraded CUFTS to version 3 to get the enhanced ERM functionality. Overall, the upgrade went well with minimal problems.
• Will be attending the Evergreen International Conference 2009 in Georgia on May 20th through May 22nd.