During the course 2008-2009 we started to plan the replacement of the computer acting as firewall and data server. Our main goal was to improve privacy by replacing the internal users shared account with separate account to each research group, through which they would have access exclusively to their data folder on each spectrometer. Marta Bocos, then a Computer Engineering student and fellow at our facility, was entrusted with the job, and after discussing several options we settled on running a ProFTPD/MySQL server with virtual user accounts to manage the data transfer, and to use the GNU/Linux bind-mount feature to restrict users to their data folder. Her work was continued during the course 2009-2010 by Júlia Giner, then a Computer Engineering and Mathematics students. As fellow at our facility, she took care of the final deployment on the new HP Proliant ML100 G5 server. On 2011 we tested the new server with a limited set of users and
spectrometers, and after the summer we started to prepare the local network for the final move, which took place on February this year. And finally on 14th March we stopped for good the old sermn01 data server which had been running on a Tulip Vision Line computer with a Pentium clocked at 166 MHz since long time ago. Incidentally, this makes the HP NetServer E60 500 hosting our m0n0wall firewall the oldest computer at SeRMN.
The graphic below summarizes the data server activity during the months of March and April. On average 3892 files totalling 1240 Mbytes were transferred daily, with a peak of 30786 files transferred on 4th April and a maximum of ca. 7 Gbytes on 20th March and on 14th April. The sustained average transmit rates were in the range 7-9 Mbytes/s, which is what can be expected for a 100 Mbps network. Last, it comes as no surprise that the transfer activity matches pretty well the pattern of weekdays and holidays.
