Transcript GRID BASED CHINESE VIRTUAL OBSERVATORY SYSTEM DESIGN
A Popular Web Server for Astronomy Education in China
Chenzhou CUI, Yongheng ZHAO National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Advantages of Internet Education Usage Statistics
• Various forms: web page, forum, chat room, BBS, etc. • Multimedia: text, picture, audio, video, etc. • Real time: news, instant message, real video, etc.
• Wide audience: no limit on age, sex, nation and … • Convenient access: no limit on time and place
User profession statistics
Difficulties Facing Astronomy Education in China
• Absence of educator: Astronomy does not appear in school curriculum.
• Absence of Chinese resources: Only one open-published magazine for astronomy education and popularization in Chinese mainland. Quite a part of existing materials are out of date.
• Construction of education website is difficult: Free web space is becoming less and less. Advertisements from commercial free web space providers are boring.
Mission and goals
To provide high quality free web space service to individuals and organizations to construct astronomy education websites: • super-large space • high stability To make the web server the first choice for Chinese astronomy education websites, to let the server hold the most abundant Chinese astronomy education resources, to improve teaching and learning of astronomy in China.
Usage in June 2003
Summary
Unique visitors
175837
Number of visits
269143
(1.53 visits per visitor) Pages
2656873
(9.87 pages per visit)
Hits vs. Days
Up to July 7th, over 60% of the 78 website owners on the server are students, including secondary level school students and college students. They learn much about astronomy by maintaining their websites and share their knowledge with others.
Hits
13571524
(50.42 hits per visit) Bandwidth
118.53 GB
(461.79 KB per visit)
Server Configuration
Hardware system
CUP
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 1.60GHz
Main board ASUS P4B Memory 1 GB
Hard Disk
Seagate ST380021A (80GB)+ ST317242A (17GB)
NIC
3Com PCI 3c905C It’s really a very common personal computer.
Software System
OS
Red Hat Linux release 7.3
WWW Server
Apache 1.3.26
DBMS
MySQL 3.23.51
+phpMyAdmin2.5.1
Script Language
PHP 4.2.2
Logfile Analyzer
AWStats 5.5
All software is open source packages.
Services provided to users
• 500 MB webpage space • Specific domain name for each user • SSH + SFTP ports connection • MySQL + phpMyAdmin DBMS service • PHP script language support On June 17th, network service of NAOC's ISP had been broken for half a day.
The lowest peak occurs on Tuesday, most people are concentrating themselves on study and work, while the second lowest peak occurred on Sunday is because of people are enjoying their weekend.
Hits vs. Hours
Visits reach peak at evening. The lowest peak occurs at early morning, because most people go to bed. Two other low peaks occur at lunchtime and suppertime, i.e. 12 and 18.
Future Plans
• Upgrade of software and hardware: To give opportunity for more users • To enhance service items: ASP, Servlet support • To improve quality of service • Automated data backup and management: RAID 1+0 • To improve the efficiency of user management
Security
• Server access: SSH+SFTP connection • File security: Special user privilege set. User of the server can only access his own files. • Data security: Disk to disk backup periodically by shell scripts.
Summary
The web server has become an important resource for astronomy education in China and a window of NAOC on public education.