In FY1999, UCAR decided to locate the UCAR Web Engineering Group in SCD. The Web Engineering Group (WEG) will implement web-related technology for UCAR in conjunction with the UCAR Web Advisory Group. Most of WEG's activities in FY1999 were spent planning and acquiring staff and hardware to begin providing this service to UCAR in FY2000.Staff
WEG currently has one staff member who will configure the UCAR web server systems and field any requests for use of the UCAR web systems. WEG is also responsible for researching new web technology and working with the Web Advisory Group to determine the usefulness of these new technologies at UCAR.Hardware configuration
The hardware configuration for the new web service was specified in FY1999. The requirements were that it be high availability, require relatively low amounts of system administration time, and that it have enough capacity to perform well for three years. Additionally, the system had to work within the constraints of the UCAR network security perimeter. Another goal was to make the system extensible, so it could be enhanced easily if necessary. The configuration consists of four machines: three Sun Enterprise 250s and one Sun Enterprise 450.These will be distributed with two of the 250 systems acting as gateways from the external network to the internal network and the real web server. These two systems will be redundant, so that if one of them goes down, the other will take over the work.
The other two systems, a 450 and a 250, will be configured as the real web server, and will only be accessible from systems inside the security perimeter. The 450 will be configured to run the actual web software. The 250 will be configured to allow users to update web pages on the web server, and it will also run the search engine indexing programs.