October 2017 - March 2018
Mike Schmidt, Matt Perna
GOES-16 issues -- we’ve been investigating a terrestrial interference (TI) issue with much higher than desirable uncorrectable errors coming from our Mesa Lab (ML) GOES-16 dish. We’re working with the receiver equipment manufacturer (Quorum Communications) and they have loaned us a “demo” hardware for installation on a dish outside the Foothills Lab (FL) cafeteria that we used previously for GVAR GOES-East. We’ve found the GOES-16 signal reception much better at FL, so we’re likely to move the GOES-16 ingest to the FL dish and repurpose the ML dish to GOES-S/17 when it becomes operational
motherlode clone upgrade and roadmap -- we’ve been working on a motherlode clone server refresh and moving machine to machine. We’ve completed atm.ucar.edu, and should have motherlode complete by the end of the month. After we’re done there, we’ll be updating equipment hosted at UW SSEC, and then to our R&D server lead.unidata.ucar.edu
100Gb/s networking -- as UCAR upgrades their backbone infrastructure from 10-20Gb/s links to 100Gb/s links, we will be upgrading our data movers (IDD cluster nodes, data aggregators, motherlode clones) from 2 x 1Gbp/s bonded ethernet as required. We’re anticipating that the addition of GOES-S data in late 2018 would have mandated the need soon anyway.
UCAR FISMA directions -- UCAR currently has contractual FISMA requirements for a small parts of the organization (none for Unidata currently), but the plan is to start down the path of making the entire organization FISMA compliant at some level yet to be determined (probably low, possibly medium). We’re having some meetings and generating lots of documents as we move incrementally in that direction.
Security -- as we’re all aware, keeping services and systems secure on the network takes consistent attention and occasional herculean efforts (to patch everything all at once). We moved reasonably quickly through the Spectre / Meltdown issue(s) but not all of our systems will have firmware patches for the BIOS. We’re keeping track and will be looking to phase those systems out on a more aggressive schedule.
LDM 7 node -- we installed, configured, tested a LDM7 test node at the Front Range GigaPOP (FRGP) just off downtown Denver in co-location with the major backbone networks supporting FRPG participants (UCAR, ..). We expect to support intensive data movement and LDM testing for the next few years on this effort.
End user (laptop/desktop) hardware refresh -- we completed the most recent round of hardware refreshes for Unidata staff. We somewhat accelerated the schedule at the recommendation of the NSF Site Visit Team (SVT) , and are very near catching up after being somewhat behind schedule for several years
Prepared March 2018