Hi Tobias, Thanks for your comments. Replies are inline.
2011/9/8 Tobias Wunden <[email protected]> > Hi Ruben, > > three things: > > a) It is great to see that another one of the main project partners is > well-headed towards a production system! > We have high hopes on this pilot, specially on the integration with our current production system, which is somehow too limited for such volume of recordings. We'll see how it goes! > b) The approach that you are taking by using the capture agents as workers > is interesting! As long as you can afford putting more expensive hardware > into the lecture halls, the processing capacity grows with the potential > number of lectures that you can store, which is a good thing. > > As downsides, I see potential security problems (the capture agents, which > people theoretically have physical access to, now need to be able to access > the backend services and data) as well as the potential to influence > recording quality if an encoding job takes longer than expected. But maybe > you have taken measures to prevent this which you didn't share in your > e-mail. > When I say "more expensive", I mean "little more expensive". It's comparatively more expensive purchasing a big appliance to host virtual workers, than a bunch of medium-high quality domestic PC. And the scalability factor was one of the most important, too. About the security concerns, the equipments will have a very limited interface and will be running with an unprivileged user. They will be as secure as the OS can be, and we think it is enough. We don't foresee people other than faculty members and students being in the classrooms where the capturers are. Re. the encoding power issue, we want to see how it goes. Perhaps renicing the priority for the encoding processes will be sufficient to allow a recording to run well. If that is not sufficient, we will have to think in other strategies, perhaps activating the "worker" part only at night time, so that no recording my interfere. We'll see. > c) You should really send this e-mail to matterhorn-users as well, since > many adopters will be interested to look at what you are doing! > I think you're right. Will do! > Tobias > > On 08.09.2011, at 14:21, Rubén Pérez wrote: > > > Hi all, > > > > I proudly announce that the University of Vigo is going to start using > its new "advanced" pilot (this is to distinguish from the previous, much > smaller-scale pilot). > > > > Our new pilot consists of 10 fully-equipped classrooms and three > videoconference rooms scattered in different buildings along the three > university campuses (which are up to 100 km away). The pilot will record an > average of 100 ~ 200 hours per week and will be in test period for the Fall > Semester. If, as we expect, the results are good, we will finally go into > production for the Spring Semester, adding new rooms and courses to the > existent ones, thus additionally extending the number of hour recorded. > > > > We are basing our pilot in the freshly-baked 1.2 Release, in combination > with a highly-customized version of the capture agent. But we are also using > a non-standard deployment that has shown very promising results in our > preliminary tests: the capture agents will function as workers in their idle > periods, thus creating a rather large network of physical workers, instead > of a few very powerful --perhaps virtual-- worker machines. This experiment > implies using slightly more powerful machines for the capturers/workers, but > we believe it's worth because physical machines are more efficient for > CPU-intensive task than their virtualized counterparts. > > > > It would be very nice if you could share your opinions on this approach > we are taking, as well as point out the possible drawbacks you think it has. > Our tests have not found any important issues for the time being, but we > could use other sources of opinion, experience and criticism to improve our > pilot as much as we can. > > > > Thanks for your attention! > > > > Best regards > > Rubén > > _______________________________________________ > > Matterhorn mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn > > > > > > To unsubscribe please email > > [email protected] > > _______________________________________________ > > _______________________________________________ > Matterhorn mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn > > > To unsubscribe please email > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ >
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