[WEB4LIB] Re: FW: counting use of resources

[John Creech]

> Not I.  But one of the various manifestos I'm always on the verge of
> writing is "You're not doing real web mastering until..." where bullet
> points would include: you have complete read-access to the raw web server
> logs; you have permission to use your choice of CGI/PHP/SSI/ASP as long as
> it's supported on your server; you know in advance, and are invited to
> comment on, any changes to the server platform; and you can write a
> .htaccess file (or its equivalent on non-Apache servers), subject to
> reasonable security precautions.  If I didn't have all of those, I'd kick
> and scream until I got it.

I agree, Thomas.  We fought a looong fight to get control of our own boxes
nearly four years ago - it was the typical computing center scenario -
"how can a bunch of librarians know anything about FreeBSD (campuswide
OS), Linux, Apache, perl, PHP, etc.?" We've experienced virtually no
webserver downtime in my 3.5 years here.  We've swapped out disks when our
site built intel webserver's disks started throwing out messages
indicating we had a disk problem. At that time we upgraded all software on
the server, from the OS to new perl and Apache, etc. And we saved *SO*
much time by being able to do this ourselves.  There are nail-biting times
too, but it's certainly been worth it...our patrons are better served,
too, in the long run, I believe.

We can reboot the server in seconds if there's a problem, and not wait
minutes, hours, or days for another agency on campus to respond. And one
of our computer center system analysts came to work for us too.  That was
a boon.

John Creech
Electronic Resources & Systems Librarian
Central Washington University Library 
office - 509-963-1081 || fax - 509-963-3684
creechj at cwu.edu