AAF Grant Progress Report Project title:
Enhancing Access to the ARCS‐Nimrod Service
Report Period:
27 Feb – 26 March, 2010
Grant Recipient and Subcontractors: Name
Position
Phone
Email
Primary
Jefferson Tan
Lecturer, Faculty of I.T.
03 9903 1172
[email protected]
Secondary
David Abramson
Professor, Faculty of I.T.
03 9905 1183
[email protected]
Other
Anthony Beitz
Technical Mnager
03 990 58681
[email protected]
Other
Neil Clarke
Director ICT Infrastructure Development IT Services Division
03 9905 4775
[email protected]
1.0 Funds, Recipient Contributions and Other Contributions
Item
Cost
Project Manager
$5k
Expenses
Balance
0 $5k
Software Engineer $30k
0 $30k
Software Tester
$5k
0 $5k
Total
$40k
0 $40k
2.0 Description and Analysis of the Progress of the Project As set out in the proposal, the second milestone due by the end of March 2010 is to add Shibboleth authentication to the Nimrod Portal.
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2.1 Milestone: Adding Shibboleth Single Sign‐on to the Nimrod Portal This milestone was intended to take care of the first half of the project, where the Nimrod Portal implements a Shibboleth‐based Service Provider and permits single sign‐on. 2.2 State of the Budget There is every indication that the project will comply with the budget constraints. All of this mini‐grant’s funds were allocated to salaries for the project manager and one developer. There are no plans to go beyond those figures. At the time of this report’s writing, none of those funds have yet to be disbursed, since QUT has not been invoiced yet. 2.3 Progress on Achieving the Outcomes The following specific tasks comprise the milestone for March 2010, in order to successfully incorporate Shibboleth into the Portal service: 1. Install a testbed Nimrod Portal service. This was achieved on host w‐cah‐790‐01.infotech.monash.edu.au, which bears an ARCS‐authorized X.509 certificate. This consists of the following steps, with the current status as of 30 March indicated: a. Install PostgreSQL ‐ DONE b. Install Apache Webserver ‐ DONE c. Install Nimrod/G and the Nimrod Portal – DONE d. Install GT4 (client packages) – ongoing 2. Install Shibboleth authentication onto Apache – PENDING Two items will be completed by mid‐April. This means that the milestone for March is up to two weeks behind. Explanations will be given below. 2.4 Project‐Related Issues Peripheral issues have taken a fair chunk of what should be development time, including hardware failures on the ARCS‐Nimrod Portal server hosts that occurred mid‐March. Installation of the Nimrod Portal has also been slow since version control has not been as tight as we’d like, and installation procedures are still largely by hand. Documentation is also incomplete, so there is a lot to learn only by doing. However, none of these issues are too big to deal with. We can still catch up with this milestone and meet the next milestone two months from now. 2.5 Proposed Changes to the Project No major changes are necessary at this point. It has been clarified that Nimrod will use MyProxy to handle SLCS. Nimrod already has MyProxy support.
3.0
Published Reports and Other Documentation
Apart from this report, no other documentation has been generated as yet in this second phase of the project.
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