Information Services

March 2009

Newsletter

University of St Andrews: IT Services + Business Improvements + Library

Special Collections acquisitionIT training courses

Surveys of staff and student opinionManaging your email

Statistical software: SPSS and AmosThirty-five years: March

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Special Collections acquisition

The University of St Andrews Library has recently accepted the generous donation of the extensive photographic archive of Hamish Macmillan Brown (b.1934). This substantial gift follows an earlier donation of his black and white photographic prints, which were transferred in to our care ten years ago. As a result, our collection is now privileged with the stewardship of Hamish Brown’s entire photographic oeuvre.

Perhaps most widely known as a climber and travel writer and as an enthusiastic exponent of outdoor education, Hamish Brown is also an accomplished poet, lecturer and photographer with wide-ranging interests. This recent gift, comprising 75,000 colour photographs, comple-ments our existing holdings of his earlier black-and-white material and reflects his interest in the natural world. Notably, the collection boasts dramatic and inspiring images of several of the world’s mountainous regions, including Scotland, the Andes, the Atlas and Anti-Atlas ranges of Morocco, the Himalayas, Switzerland and Slovakian Tatras.

As an addition to our existing photographic collection, this vast resource of original pho-tographs augments our holdings by providing intimate, artistic, and topographic views documenting the changing physical and cultural landscape of Scotland, Morocco, and various other mountainous regions of the world.

In 1997 Hamish Brown received a DLitt from the University of St Andrews in recognition of his literary works. Other notable honours include the Fellowship of the Scottish Royal Geo-graphic Society, and in 2001 Dr Brown was awarded an MBE for his services in encouraging an appreciation of the outdoors by young people. For more information on Hamish Brown see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamish_Brown

Beinn Alligin from Liathach (Ross & Cromarty) ca.1980 (HMB-438) Courtesy of University of St Andrews Library

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Surveys of staff and student opinion

IT training courses

We are re-developing our IT training courses this semester and are increasingly using new training materials from Watsonia. The following courses will be run over the Easter break:

• Introduction to Dreamweaver Monday 6 April 2009: 2pm – 5pm: Butts Wynd PC classroom

• Microsoft Office 2003 Tuesday 7 April 2009: 10am – 4pm: Swallowgate IT training room

• Databases with Access Wednesday 8 April 2009: 10am – 4pm: Swallowgate IT training room

• Introduction to cascading style sheets Friday 10 April 2009: 2pm – 5pm: Butts Wynd PC classroom

Further details of these courses are available from the Training section of the Computer and IT Support web site. To book a place on any of these sessions, please contact the IT Helpdesk (email: helpdesk, telephone 3333).

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In late 2008 and early 2009, IT Services conducted separate surveys of staff and student opinion. These were online surveys similar to paper-based surveys that had been carried out in 2002 and 2005. A total of 315 responses were completed and returned by staff (cf 290 in 2005) and 791 returned by students (cf 422 in 2005).

There was one element of the staff survey that was largely copied from similar surveys carried out in 2002 and 2005. This was contained in the second part of the questionnaire that asked users to score, using a scale of 1 (low) to 7 (high), the importance and quality of a range of services and systems we operate.

Overall results for the current and earlier surveys are reproduced here; please note that there were too few responses for category 35 (wireless provision) to present a result in the ‘quality’ diagram in 2005. A complete comparison cannot be made with the earlier surveys since we’ve added some new

categories and removed others. The 2002 and 2005 survey results may be found in Newsletter articles in April and May 2002 and in November 2005 and January 2006.

There were six areas where the gap between importance of a service and the quality of service was greater than 1 and these will be amongst the areas that we will be focusing on. In just two of these were they deemed to have worsened since 2005 and with respect to one of these, email, whilst a quality score of 5.5 is not terrible, we have started a review of the service as planned in the University’s ICT Strategy 2008–2011.

We thank everyone who took the trouble to complete these surveys. We should not place too much emphasis on survey data that can only scratch the surface of many areas; but the results and all comments will be thoroughly considered when drawing up our future plans. An analysis of both surveys is being carried out and results will be published in due course.

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Managing your email

Recent performance issues with the University’s email servers have highlighted a problem which all of us need to be aware of. A small number of users are failing to manage their email properly, but this impinges upon all of us because their large email inboxes cause the servers to slow down considerably when processing and delivering email for all of us.

After being checked and processed by the University’s email systems, new messages for a user are delivered to their inbox on one of the University’s mail stores (servers which deal with delivering email). All of the emails in a user’s inbox on their mail store are contained within a single file. The larger the inbox file, the longer it takes for the server to process tasks on that inbox. If the user’s inbox is very large these processes take, in computer terms, a considerable amount of time. Multiply this extra server activity by a hundred active users and the problem becomes acute:

• Every time the email client on a user’s computer makes a request to their mail store to check for new email the server must parse the entire contents of the inbox file before delivering it to the user.

• When a new email message is received by the email system the recipient’s inbox file must be rewritten to accommodate the new message.

• When a message is deleted from a user’s inbox the entire file must be rewritten to re-move the deleted message.

At the end of February IT Services Systems staff identified a small but significant number of users with mail store inboxes larger than 350MB. These users were informed and asked to rectify the situation within twenty-four hours. Many people heeded this request but those who didn’t had their inboxes moved into their home directories by IT Services staff. A couple of accounts had inboxes in excess of 1GB, the largest being a record-breaking 1.6GB consisting of 110,000 unread emails (99% spam) and just 2 read messages.

Supported clients and protocols for managing email

New email messages arrive in a user’s inbox on their mail store. Thereafter, what they do with these messages is dependent on which method they use to check and store their email. The University supports a number of email client programs and protocols. WebMail is provided as a web-based email client available on any computer with an active Internet connection and a web browser. Mozilla Thunderbird is the email program of choice for users connecting to the University’s email system via our data network, or by Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection over the Internet.

The two supported email protocols are Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) and Internet Message Access Protocol version 4 (IMAP4). Older email clients, such Qualcomm’s Eudora, only work properly using POP3. However, email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird and the Macintosh Mail program can use either protocol to handle email. WebMail is an IMAP4-only system.

POP3 and IMAP4 work in different ways. POP3, the older protocol, makes copies of the emails in the user’s server inbox, saving them within a local inbox on the user’s computer. By default,

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the original email is then deleted from the mail store, although the email client can be config-ured to instruct the mail store to retain the messages indefinitely, or for a set period of time.

In contrast, IMAP4 leaves messages on the mail store, but allows the email client to connect directly to the mail store in order to access the messages stored there. The University’s Web-Mail system is an example of an IMAP-based service, which allows you to access your email from any computer connected to the Internet.

If you use POP3, when you are using your main computer you will always have access to your saved emails because they are stored locally. You only need to connect to the University net-work to download new messages from your mail store inbox. However, if you do not have access to your main computer, your saved emails will be inaccessible.

If you use IMAP4, you must be connected to the University network to access your server-side mailboxes, either directly via the University network, or by using a VPN connection via the Internet. You can also use WebMail from any computer connected to the Internet.

Using email folders

As well as having a personal inbox on a mail store, each user also has personal disk space on another server, sometimes called their “home” server. Within each user’s personal disk space there is an email directory where a user can create any number of email folders to store read messages. It is important to be aware that these mail folders can exist, as knowing the location of your email messages is important.

Email folders, also known as mailboxes, can be located locally or within a user’s personal disk space on one of the home servers. These mailboxes can have names like ‘pending’, ‘sent-mail’, ‘deleted-items’, etc. Confusingly, client-side mailboxes can have the same names as their server-side counterparts. With a few exceptions, the majority of users’ home directories now reside within the Central File Store (CFS).

POP3 users access incoming messages from their client-side inbox. These can then be moved to other local email folders. IMAP4 users access their incoming messages via their server-side inbox. Read messages can be moved to other server-side email folders located within their personal disk space, or to client-side email folders on their own computer.

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When you move a message from your server-side inbox to another server-side email folder you are moving it off the mail store into your home directory on another server. When you move an email from your server-side inbox to a client-side email folder you are moving the message off the mail store into an email folder on your own office or personal computer.

Ways to ensure that your email is managed properly

• Move emails out of your inbox on the mail store as soon as possible after arrival. Create email folders to store important emails, either locally or in your home directory.

• Delete unimportant or spurious emails after you have viewed them, or immediately if they are obviously rubbish.

• When using an IMAP4 email client, deleting a message from your inbox only marks it for deletion – it is not actually deleted. To do this you must expunge the contents. To ensure that marked deleted messages are removed you must have your local email client set to “Clean up (‘Expunge’) Inbox on Exit” when you close your local email client.

• Consider setting up a spam filter to remove emails marked as {Spam?} before they arrive in your inbox.

• When using IMAP4, set up filters in your local email client to move emails automatically from the server-side inbox into other mailboxes.

• If you are using POP3 ensure that your email client is set to delete mail from the server after a reasonable period and that messages are deleted from the server-side inbox when deleted from the client-side inbox or trash folder.

• Do not check for new mail using more than one email client at the same time. POP3 creates a temporary ‘lock’ file when checking for mail and IMAP4 does something similar. If another request to check for new mail is issued by an email client before the previous one has been completed, the system will encounter the still-locked inbox and the process will fail.

• Set your email client to check for new mail less frequently. Because of the way that our email systems work, checking for new mail every minute is more likely to slow down the reception of email rather than speed it up, and the problem of temporary lock files (as above) is likely to occur. Configure your email client to check for new mail no more frequently than every ten minutes.

Why inboxes on the mail stores can get large

There are a number of reasons why a user’s inbox on the mail store can get too large. Reasons range from not understanding how the email systems work, to inefficient working practices or simple lack of interest. There are also many cases of ‘abandoned’ accounts, where an indi-vidual or group no longer requires a specific account but hasn’t informed IT Services, so that we are unaware that the account can be deleted.

Some people who use POP3 to access their University email account set their email client to leave a copy of the original email on the server. This allows them to use an IMAP-based client such as WebMail, or another POP3 email client, to check their email when they are not in their office. However, if the local email clients have not been set up properly, this can lead to the inbox on the mail store getting very large.

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If you access your email from more than one location it is important to set up one of the computers as the “master” device. This machine should be set to manage your account, deleting server-side inbox emails at set intervals or when deleted from the client-side inbox. Some users assume that when they delete an email from a local inbox, wherever it is located, it’s gone and forgotten. However, if the email client’s settings have not been set correctly the original emails will not be deleted, and will accumulate in the server-side inbox.

Some users feel that they cannot perform their jobs properly unless they have access to every email received in the last n months (or years) in the same place. This argument is not tenable because, regardless of whether you use IMAP4 or POP3 as your email protocol, it is a simple matter to create another email folder to store important read messages. These messages are accessible with one extra click of a mouse.

A small number of users argue that they do not have the time to manage their email inbox. The assumption is that storage space is infinite, and that having ten thousand emails in an inbox won’t be a problem for them or anyone else. Ninety percent of the emails in the inbox have been marked as {Spam?}, almost all are unread and unwanted, but none get deleted. If you don’t want to read your spam, IT Services has provided a web page where you can set up a filter to remove these messages before they reach your inbox.

One compelling reason to keep your inbox small is to minimise the effects of a virus-infected email getting past our MailScanner systems into your local inbox. When F-Secure discovers what it thinks is a virus it may offer to delete or quarantine the infected file. As far as F-Secure is concerned your inbox is a single file. If you have set F-Secure to delete infected files automatically the entire contents of your inbox will be deleted. If your inbox contains many months of incoming messages, this will be a major disaster!

Some spam email figures to ponder

Dealing with spam messages is a major issue for our email systems. The following figures relate to the week beginning 7 March 2009 and reflect external incoming emails only. They do not take into account the flow of internal emails.

During the period mentioned above the University’s email systems processed 4.8 million emails from external sources. Of these, 3.6 million messages, which were sent from blacklisted organisations and other dubious sources, were immediately rejected by our systems. This represents 78% of all external incoming email. The remaining 990,000 messages were accepted for delivery, although we marked 732,000 of these as possible spam.

Conclusion

Dealing with email can be simple if you try to understand how the email systems work and you take a little time to ensure that you use the service responsibly. Inaction or apathy doesn’t just affect an individual; it can have consequences for all of us.

If you have any questions about your own email set-up, or need assistance with reconfiguring or updating your email client, please contact the IT Helpdesk (email helpdesk).

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Thirty-five years: March

Statistical software: SPSS and Amos

SPSS

To help our users to move data from older versions of SPSS to more current versions of the software, we no longer charge for the latest version of SPSS. SPSS 17.0 is now freely available for download to University of St Andrews staff and students.

We would remind users of our intention to withdraw all but the latest version of SPSS as of the beginning of the Academic Year 2009–2010. (Please see the December 2008 issue of the Newsletter for further details.)

Amos

In response to various requests from users we have taken out a new site licence for Amos. Amos is provided by SPSS and is structural equation modelling software. Further details

are available on the SPSS web site at: http://www.spss.com/AMOS.

As with SPSS, Amos can be downloaded from the software section of the Computer and IT Support web site.

Software downloads

Software provided via the Computer and IT Support web site can only be downloaded from the University of St Andrews network. Where licensing conditions permit the in-stallation of software on privately owned computers, access to these downloads from outwith the University network requires a VPN connection. Please see the section on ‘Networks and systems’ on the Computer and IT Support web site for details on how to set up a VPN connection.

The Newsletter for March 1974 started with a surprise for the users, detailing the outcome of correspondence with the Computer Board for Universities and Research Councils (the current government funding source): we had been asked by them if we were ‘interested’ in the acquisition of a second IBM 360/44 (second-hand from Cambridge University). Although the Computer Committee and then the Planning Committee had agreed to accept this offer, it was then withdrawn because of a reduction in the Computer Board budget and an increase in the asking price. We reverted to our plans to replace our 360/44 during 1977/78 (although that didn’t actually happen until 1980). Other items from that issue included announcement of a Remote Job Entry terminal (based on an Interdata 70 computer) for offloading some of our

increasing work-load to regional computer centres such as Edinburgh.

Alternative graphical output was featured in 1986, when the March Newsletter announced an add-on direct (film) camera system for the Tektronix 4107 terminal, a better-quality solution than the attached colour plotter. By March 1987, we were “investigating software for using the Apple LaserWriter, attached to the Macintosh computer… as an output device for a number of applications running on the VAX systems”. Some idea of the popularity of the new (and expensive) LaserWriter may be gauged from the “new booking arrangements” announced in the same issue, and (in March 1988) the fitting of a Copytex card system (similar to those used for pre-paid photocopying). A new colour

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printer (HP DeskJet 55C, in the John Honey building), colour scanner (HP IIC, in the Gatty) and colour slide scanner (Microtek, in the Bute Medical building) were all featured in March 1993.

In March 1975, the idea of a Users’ Forum was raised, initially as an informal method for collecting user opinions: this was implemented as a system of User Representatives, whose meetings were reported in several March Newsletters over subsequent years. March 1976 saw the second edition of the ‘Compendium of Error Messages for RAX and MFT’ (the two most generally used systems timetabled on the 360/44): it was printed on A5 sheets, in different colour-coded sections, to be sold at 75p. Alas, experience proved that users were not all that keen to have such a hefty but comprehensive collection, and the enormous effort we expended in typing, collating and binding by hand was very largely wasted. By 1994, some kinds of information were on-line: we had a ‘message of the day’ (MOTD) system at login on the Sun systems, but an article was needed in March to explain the categories of message that were allowable, as users had been requesting all sorts of non-computer service announcements for inclusion.

More significant on-line services were announced in March 1995: the new NISS (National Information Services and Systems) Information Gateway, which was now using web technology. However, BT’s Electronic Yellow Pages service via NISS was withdrawn at short notice, as it was to be no longer free of charge.

The Newsletter for March 1980 reported on the fact that computer users were freely giving their sign-on codes and passwords to friends “to try out the system” – some were even “using other people’s resources with or without the knowledge of the owners”. Users were recommended to change their passwords at frequent intervals.

A local oddity was aired in March 1977: the paper output from the 360/44 line-printer

was the customary fan-folded continuous stationery – but of non-standard size, 8 inches deep instead of the usual 11 inches. This had been deliberately chosen so that hefty wads of listings would sit handily on our bookshelves; but it meant (amongst other things) that users needed to take account of the ‘non-standard’ number of lines to be printed between consecutive folds on a page, especially if they sent jobs to computer systems elsewhere.

By March 1981, the replacement VAX systems had been installed for several months, and use of the old punched cards for submitting jobs had dwindled almost to zero: as space was needed for more terminals, the facility was to be reduced to one card-punch and a verifier, and the cabinets of stored cards were to be removed (to users’ departments as appropriate). In contrast, the same issue made early mention of a ‘Cambridge Ring’ development for networking terminals, peripherals and computers, so that “any device may ‘talk’ to any other”. A long and detailed article on ‘User Disk Files’ appeared in March 1985: this went through all the various file types on the VAX systems (indicated, as is now common, by filename extensions) showing how much space they used, and (optimistically) how soon they might be deleted to make more space on our two central disk drives – a mere 512MB each drive.

The subject of privacy arose in March 1989, with an article on the VAX/VMS ‘name’ facility that allowed users to discover other logged-on users’ real names via their usernames (as shown by current ‘process’ names). This facility was now withdrawn, but we preserved the converse facility, for finding people’s usernames (for sending email).

March 1990 saw notification of the replacement of the VAX systems with the Sun systems, with an explanation of how user files would be transferred across. In March 1991 was announced withdrawal of the last VAX system

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This monthly Newsletter is also available on-line (with search facility) via the ‘Computer and IT Support’ web pages, and is edited by Peter Adamson (telephone 2762, email pga).

The deadline for contributions for the April2009issue is Monday13April.

Circulation list updates to ITServicesSecretaryat ButtsWynd (2770, its@st-andrews.ac.uk)

Main addresses: IT Services + BI: St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL telephone: 01334 462770 fax: 462759 Library: St Andrews, Fife KY16 9TR telephone: 01334 462283 fax: 462282

The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland : No SC013532

(SAVA) – and with it the ability to read 800bpi magnetic tapes. Another new development then was the arrival of high-density (HD, 800KB) 3 ½” floppy disks, already being fitted to Macintosh computers: this was the final standard format of such disks, indicated by the small square hole opposite the write-protect tab. Coincidentally, there was also an article on use of high-density 5 ¼” (1.2MB) disks on some PCs (but not in our classrooms). On the topic of classrooms, March 1992 saw the move of what is now the Butts Wynd classroom from its original location at the front of the Old Union building: we even had CD-writing facilities by March 2005 and double-sided printing in March 2007. And if you wanted to run PC programs on a Mac, then Virtual PC was recommended in March 2002.

Problems with dial-up modems were the subject of a short note in March 1990: the (single –line) facility allowed connection speeds from 300 baud (V21) all the way up to 2400 baud (V22bis). A different communications issue was briefly reported in March 1999: the transatlantic JANET link had been broken somewhere between Iceland and the Faeroes – probably by a trawler.

And finally, in an earlier historical survey, the Newsletter for March 2005 featured a photograph of an aid to computer air-conditioning, circa 1970 – ‘the poisoned fountain’…