NGS at the EGI Community Forum, Munich

You can tell it’s been conference season over the past few weeks – lots of travelling, lack of sleep and notes written in cryptic language on my laptop from various sessions and presentations.

The EGI Community Forum was held in Munich, Germany at the end of March and consisted of 4 days of conferencing and various workshops on the Monday morning.  As well as helping to look after the UK NGI exhibition stand, I also attended a wide variety of interesting sessions including:

• Sustaining the EGIInfrastructure
• Impact of e-Infrastructures: Theories and practices ofassessment methodologies
• Community-tailored Services
• Communication: the key to future funding

Each session had its highlights – the EGI session looked at how to count the number of users that EGI actually has.  They attempted to do this through the use of VOMS (Virtual Organization Membership Service) but there were problems with the information contained being out of date or indeed missing in some cases, not all users being registered, expired users still being in the system and many more.  However at the end of the day they did eventually come up with a definitive figure which was as accurate as possible on the day it was calculated – 20706.

Also in this session was a presentation from the German national grid – D-Grid.  They presented on a business model for a sustainable Grid infrastructure.  The slides from this session are definitely worth a look for anyone interested in the next stage of national e-infrastructure.

I also presented on the NGS Campus and Community Champion initiatives at the NGS in the session on Communication.  To save me telling you all about it, I’m instead going to provide a link to a blog post written by Elizabeth Leake who wrote about her take on the session and my presentation.

A big congratulations to the local organisers who did a fantastic job – great venue and great food as well as inbuilt entertainment in the conference venue.  You may have to join our Facebook page to see evidence of this coming soon!

Munich was another great EGI event and we’re already planning and looking forward to the next one which is the EGI Technical Forumin Prague in September. 

Doing a lot of talking about software

Recently I attended the Software Sustainability Institute Collaboration Workshop (CW) which was held in a very sunny Oxford for 2 days.  It was a busy workshop for me due to being on the steering committee, being part of the events team, chairing a session, giving a lightning talk and scribing for some of the sessions as well!

If you’ve never been to a CW before then the best way to describe it is a conference but not as you know it!  In most conferences people sit and listen to one person giving a demo or PowerPoint presentation at the front of a lecture theatre.  At a CW people pick the topics they want to discuss and head off into break out rooms to have stimulating and interactive discussions about these topics.  Everyone then reconvenes in the main lecture theatre and all the groups report back to inform all delegates of the points and issues raised as well as some possible solutions!

However before the breakout sessions there were some lightning talks – short presentations done against the clock.  Simon Hettrick from SSI makes sure that there are no misunderstandings as a large countdown timer is projected up on the screen along with the one and only slide you are allowed.  I have done lightning talks before at SSI events but this time Simon had raised the bar by only giving each delegate a mere 3 mins.  As I had to present on both the Campus and Community champs in this time it was a tall order but I made it – just!

After the adrenaline rush of the lightning talks we moved onto the more sedate business of breakout sessions.  During the two days I attended several sessions -

•    Building research and communication networks across disciplines
•    How to blog, and how to run a blog 
•    Bringing together representatives of the research community: Institute's Agents and SSAs, and the SeIUCCR Community and Campus Champions
•    Using the internet and social media to increase your impact and publicise research to the public and research community 

From each of these sessions the 5 most important points learnt during the session were recorded and reported back along with -

•    What are the problems, and are there solutions?
•    What further work could be done, and who should do it?
•    Are there any useful resources that people should know about?

All the notes from all the sessions are available through the Collaborations Workshop 2012 Google Group – you don’t need a Google account to view the information.  They make for some very interesting reading particularly if you are a research software engineer or a researcher who uses software!

Photos from the event are also available which prove just how nice the weather really was before we descended back into winter this week!

Radio silence

It's gone a bit quiet over here at the NGS blog lately mainly because I was completely caught up in writing a bid which took over my life for a few weeks.  As it was all I did for a couple of weeks I didn't have much to blog about.  Hopefully the bid will be successful and we'll have some exciting news for you in the near future!

Apart from that I have been working with colleagues at SSI in preparation for their Collaborations Workshop which will take place on the 21st - 22nd of March.  There has been a great response with maximum attendance and a great range of people attending.  One of the purposes of the workshop is to get researchers and software engineers working networking to find where they can help each other out. There aren't many conferences out there where the aim is to get everyone talking to each other all day instead of just a few people doing the talking!

In completely different news I just posted an article to the NGS website from EGI.  The EGI are showcasing their users research much the same as the NGS user case studies do (wonder where they got the idea from...?).  They are doing their case studies in the form of video interviews and the first one focuses on the research of Henry Hocking of the CONCO project who used the grid to analyse naturally occurring molecules in venoms used by marine snails to immobilise their prey.  You never would have guessed that one!

On email addresses in distinguished names

Those of you who are sysadmins know we have email addresses in host certificates, in their distinguished names (DNs).  The origin of this decision is lost in the mists of time - it certainly pre-dates the UK e-Science CA - I seem to remember something about host certificates being used as clients and the email address of the contact appearing in the log file, as a forerunner of "robot" certificates - which can't quite be right because initially we did not give host certificates client extensions. But hosts have been used in this way to implement portals.

In any case, the practice is now deprecated, mainly because much of our software (strictly speaking incorrectly) depends on the string representation of the DN, and different software stringifies emailaddress in different ways. We have been meaning to get rid of it for a while, waiting only for some code changes and an update to the policy.

In fact the policy needs updating because in a (very small) number of cases we are doing things that are not consistent with the policy - but which are nonetheless wholly consistent with IGTF. Actually the only examples I can think of is that we have permitted two "software robots," a practice which is permitted by IGTF now but wasn't when our policy was written.

The proposal is now that we remove email addresses from DNs, before the policy rewrite is finished (its about 2/3 done since you ask.) Removing email addresses is clearly consistent with IGTF, but deviates from our historical practice of  preserving the end entity DN across all generations of CA certificates. Having an out of date policy is of course not consistent with IGTF...

The trouble is, how do we know whether people depend on the email address in the DN?  We have no way of knowing how the certificates are being used. Of course we could take the approach that if the certificate is being used for unsupported purposes, then you're on your own. OTOH, we have usually strived not to do that, even if grid software makes that quite difficult (see GFD.125 again, or every rollover).

So we need to leave it to the "owner" of the certificate to decide. The easiest way of doing this is JK's proposal, that we remove email address from new certificates, but keep them on renewal. For host certificates, getting a new certificate is often the same amount of work as a renewal.  Existing certificates are not affected but if you want your certificate to be affected you could revoke it and get a new one.

And of course all this applies only to hosts, there is no change for personal certificates.

Bits and pieces

It's been one of those weeks with a lot of bits and pieces going on.  Busy and varied is how I'd probably sum it up!

Tuesday was the NGS Collaboration Board meeting which was held at the University of Birmingham thanks to the kind hospitality of Paul Hatton.  The theme of the meeting was reaching out and engaging with potential new communities and existing user communities.  Mike Jones gave a presentation on SaRONGS to show how we are making it easier for people to access grid resources and I gave a presentation on the Campus and Community Champions networks.  Following on neatly from my presentation was Rebecca Notman who is one of our Community Champions.  Rebecca spoke about her role and how the NGS has played a part in her research.  There was also plenty of time for discussion with each of our Collaboration Board members updating us on new and activities from their institutions.  It seems to be a busy time in the world of research computing!

Wednesday was the next seminar in our short series.  This time it was the turn of John Kewley from STFC Daresbury who is the NGS helpdesk manager.  After a few technical issues, John spoke about the Certificate Wizard - a tool that the NGS produced to help people manage their grid certificate more easily and it seems to have worked.  There have been less helpdesk queries regarding certificates since the introduction of the tool.

Yesterday morning I took part in the steering group for the forthcoming Software Sustainability Institute Collaboration Workshop.  This is always a really enjoyable conference as it's 2 days of full interactive discussion and networking.  If you go to a conference to get peace and quiet to read your email then this isn't for you!  Every session is a group discussion session apart from when the groups report back to the conference as a whole.  There are some really interesting topics for discussion this year, all of which have been suggested by the attending delegates.  If you would like to attend and you are a software developer then have a look at this as you may be able to get a free place and a contribution towards your expenses.

One down two to go

Yesterday saw the first presentation in our short seminar series concentrating on the recent developments in the UK for accessing and managing grid resources.

I'm pleased (and relieved!) to say that it went well with Mike Jones from the University of Manchester giving a presentation on "Shibboleth Access to Resources on the NGS".  We had 28 individuals join us on Evo from all over the world including Russia, Italy, USA and Switzerland.  It was good to see that our seminar was of interest to people internationally as well.

The next seminar will take place on Wednesday 8th Feb at 10.30am (GMT) and will be looking at the Certificate Wizard which makes it easier for users to manage their certificates.  If you would like to take part in the seminar either by Access Grid or Evo then please see the event listing on our website.  You can also RSVP on our Facebook event page.

The seminars have been recorded and it is our aim to have these recordings available on the NGS website at the end of the seminar series.

Interested in accessing and managing grid resources?

If so then read on!

The NGS is hosting a short but sweet seminar series starting next Wednesday (1st Feb).  There will be 3 seminars over the 3 weeks each lasting approximately 30 minutes and the best thing about them is that you can join in no matter where you are - all you need is the internet!

We wanted to make the seminars as open to everyone as we possibly could and, after some deliberation, we decided to use the Evo technology.  This is free for everyone to use - all you have to do is to register and I recommend doing this at least the day before.  This isn't anything to do with Evo's registration process more that it took several hours for my university email system to allow my confirmation email through...

So what are the topics that we will be discussing?

1st February - Shibboleth Access to Resources on the NGS – Mike Jones, NGS, University of Manchester
This talk will demonstrate how it is possible to access and use NGS resources using institutional login credentials (via the UK Access Management Federation).  It will describe how the UK's two main e-Science authentication systems are combined to form an easy to use yet robust identity management environment.  It will discuss how this mechanism links together with system, project and Virtual Organisation (VO) registration procedures.

8th February - Certificate Management in the UK - John Kewley, NGS, STFC Daresbury Laboratory
The NGS helpdesk receives many tickets relating to certificates (and certificate renewal in particular): largely due to browser incompatibilities.  In order to tackle this problem, the NGS has devised CertWizard which is a browser-independent certificate tool.  The presentation will give an introduction to the UK e-Science CA, which has issued over 30,000 certificates, and its associated software and interfaces, including CertWizard.
It will show how modernisations are being made at various stages of the certificate lifecycle, making it easier than ever for users to manage their e-Science Certificate.

15th February - Moonshot - next generation federated identity - Josh Howlett, JANET
Federated identity yields significant benefits for users and services by increasing the usability of services, reducing identity management costs and improving regulatory compliance.
A number of different technical strategies for federating identity have emerged during the past decade, with differing levels of success. These technologies address different types of use case, resulting in significant complexity for both users, services and trust infrastructure providers.
This complexity impedes the adoption of services and increasing operational costs. Moreover, there are many use cases where these technologies do not provide a solution.
Project Moonshot is an ambitious Janet-led initiative, building on existing deployed technologies, that aim to develop a single unified and standardised approach that satisfies all of the authentication and authorisation requirements of the education & research community. Much of the technology has now been implemented, and is now being tested within the Janet Moonshot Technology Pilot.
This presentation will provide an overview of some of the motivating use cases for Moonshot and an overview of the technology and the implementation.

Full details of how to join the seminars are available on the NGS website event page but if you have any queries then please contact the helpdesk and we will do our utmost to help you join in.