| 11/10/98 RMIUG Meeting
- Maintaining Huge Web Sites
The Tuesday, Nov 10th meeting of the Rocky
Mountain Internet Users Group (RMIUG) will
feature a panel discussion on how webmasters
maintain HUGE sites.
Our panelists are:
Don Milani (Don.Milani@Sun.com)
is a Manager-Dude with Web Services Engineering
at Sun Microsystems in Broomfield. Sun is
the company that brought you Network Computing,
Java Programming, and is currently a major
thorn in Microsoft's side. The Web Services
Engineering group (WSE) develops the global
technology architecture, infrastructure
and core services to enable Sun's Internet,
Intranet, and E-Commerce business strategy.
WSE runs SunWeb, Sun's Intranet site. SunWeb
is the portal to ~3600 global corporate
Web sites, contains more than 4 million
pages, and is the primary corporate resource
for news, information, tools, templates,
techno-babble, rants and raves and was recently
chosen as one of the top 50 Intranet Web
sites by CIO magazine. In this presentation
you'll learn about SunWeb's operations and
best practices. Joining Don for the Q&A
will be the Webmasters who run amok with
SunWeb.
Don manages a team of 6 Webmaster wonks
at Sun. His group's primary responsibilities
include overseeing system needs and infrastructure
services for Sun's Intranet (SunWeb) and
Internet (www.sun.com)
presence, and the company's internal ISP
organization (SunIntraWeb). Don's background
includes a prior incarnation as the Business
Line Manager for Internet Operations at
Exabyte Corporation in Boulder. He's been
in the high tech field for ten very long
years, working for a variety of companies
including a couple of start-ups. Don has
a marketing and general business background.
He's currently reliving his teenage years
with his 13 year old son.
Dave Goldhammer (Dave.Goldhammer@colorado.edu)
is a Unix system admin in the Information
Technology Services department at the University
of Colorado. His group takes care of 50+
Unix systems, most acting in some sort of
server capacity. Their major focus is running
the systems that faculty, staff, and students
use for e-mail, personal web pages, and
general access to the Internet. The four
"big" systems that provide these services
have approximately 40,000 user accounts
(ALL of which can have personal web pages)
and typically handle 800-900 interactive
users at any given time on a weekday.
A major responsibility of this group is
running www.Colorado.EDU,
which, until recently, was running on an
outdated system with severely strained resources.
Dave will discuss the problems and challenges
they have faced attempting to provide good
response times to very high volumes of traffic
and allowing a wide variety of campus departments
and groups access to the server to modify
and update their pages. Another significant
challenge has been planning for extremely
high, but infrequent, peak usage times,
such as the starts of new semesters. Dave
has spent time looking at many aspects of
big web server configuration and administration,
including disk configuration, memory, networking,
load balancing between multiple servers,
access and security for diverse groups of
web publishers, statistics and log files,
etc... He will talk about where CU Boulder
is now in terms of web servers and what
plans, goals, and ideas they have for the
future of the web on campus.
Dave has an undergraduate degree in Computer
Science and part of a masters in Telecommunications
(which he doesn't ever plan on finishing).
He has never worked in the "real world",
and can usually be found playing ultimate
frisbee or hiking and taking photographs
when not doing this nerdy stuff.
Randall Gaz (gaz@xor.com)
is a Senior Programmer in the Internet Technologies
Group at XOR Network Engineering. The Internet
Technologies group is dedicated to creating,
maintaining, and hosting complex, high-profile,
high-traffic web sites. He will discuss
how XOR Network Engineering has sucessfully
developed several high-exposure, high-traffic
sites, including The Sporting News, GOLFonline,
SkiNet, and others. The sites are engineered
from the ground-up with performance in mind.
Randall will highlight important decisions
that were made in the development process
to ensure that the web sites perform well
while offering highly complex interactive
features.
Randall has a Bachelor's in Computer Science
from the University of Colorado at Boulder
and has been instrumental in designing several
large public web sites.
URL's of interest:
The meeting is Tuesday, November 10th
from 7:00 - 9:00 pm (with optional 6:30
pm start for refreshments and informal networking).
The meeting will be held at The National
Center for Atmospheric Research at 1850
Table Mesa Drive in Boulder, which is located
on the west end of Table Mesa Drive, up
the hill, right under the Flatirons. For
door-to-door driving direction, go to MapQuest
(http://www.mapquest.com/
), click on TripQuest, enter your starting
address, NCAR's address, and voila! Park
in the NCAR lot, go in the main door, and
ask the guard to point you to meeting, which
is held in the main auditorium, right off
the lobby. The meeting is free and open
to the public, but we may pass the hat to
help defray expenses.
RMIUG appreciates the ongoing support
from XOR Network Engineering (http://www.xor.com)
for administration of RMIUG's electronic
discussion lists & WWW site. Thanks also
to NDA (http://www.nda.com)
for sponsorship of refreshments for our
group.
Consultants and companies are invited
to bring Internet-related product information,
brochures, and business cards which will
be displayed on an information table.
We will be giving away several copies
of the 1998 book "Poor Richard's Web Site:
Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building
a Low-Cost Web Site" by Colorado author
Peter Kent (PKent@TopFloor.com).
http://www.poorrichard.com/
has more details on the book, which was
"Book of the Month" in BYTE magazine.
There is an email mailing list set up for
this group. General information can be obtained
by sending an Email to rmiug@rmiug.org
which will generate an auto-reply message
that tells you about the lists and how to
subscribe. You can also reach the RMIUG
"Executive" Committee at rmiug-comm@rmiug.org.
Our WWW site is at http://www.rmiug.org/
(To suggest a topic, send your idea to
rmiug-comm@rmiug.org)
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