Bluefin Web Server Transition

This message is intended for the owners of web sites hosted on UTMB’s UNIX web server, Bluefin. This server is also known as www.utmb.edu.

Although Bluefin has served the institution well for many years, its seven years of service are beginning to show. The server has become increasing difficult to maintain at a level required for our primary web gateway. Bluefin is finally wearing out.

For the past two years, we’ve been steadily creating and/or moving sites to an NT web server, Snapper (aka www2.utmb.edu). Now a second, far more powerful and speedier NT server is online, Wahoo. The plan is to make Wahoo, which runs MS IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000, our primary institutional web server.

This move will present us with an opportunity to accomplish some long anticipated goals, chief among them the consolidation of our primary domains into a single one: www.utmb.edu. (No more "www.utmb.edu" and "www2.utmb.edu").

This change will also provide us the ability to provide better indexing and searches, better reports, offer more redundancy and better backups, and down the road, load balancing. All in all, this is a step toward a more modern, up-to-date web hosting environment.

In the coming weeks, Bluefin will be taken offline. Our tentative date is Nov. 6. At that time, the address www.utmb.edu, which currently points at Bluefin, will be redirected to point at Wahoo. Publishers currently hosted on Bluefin will be able to continue to use their same web addresses and access files as they have in the past.

Most of the active directories and pages published and hosted at Bluefin have already been transferred over to Wahoo. While we made every effort to capture every file and maintain every link, we need your help. In the next few days, please check your pages carefully for any problems we can solve together. If we've missed a site,  please  contact us.

Here are some points or issues to watch for and consider:

• The new default page on Wahoo is "default.htm" (rather than index.html or index.htm). We can help switch or rename files, as necessary.

• UNIX is case sensitive; NT is not. If a publisher had two pages on Bluefin called "TEST.htm" and "test.htm," they were served as different pages on the old server, but will cause a conflict on the new server (one will have likely overwritten the other). Also, please purge any special characters or blanks spaces from your file names.

• Users running scripts on Bluefin pages should contact us. We’ve identified what we think are some attractive NT-based alternatives for most applications scripted on the older server. In any case, we’ll help make sure there's a solution that works available.

• Former UNIX publishers will continue to have FTP access to Wahoo. No one will be forced to use FrontPage, although that’s an option for those who'd like to investigate it. The NT server will also support and allow web publishers to explore Active Server Pages.

• PDF files originally gave us some problems when importing them to the new server, but we think we’ve addressed those. Please check these files carefully, if any are used on a site.

• Publishers who hired contractors and gave them access to  UNIX-hosted web via telnet or FTP, will need to be reset access and passwords through an existing Information Services process. Call us for assistance.

• We will be replacing Veritiy indexing with Microsoft Index Server. This will require some changes in the HTML used in the search forms, and again, we can help.

• If your web makes any references to "snapper" in a hyperlink ("snapper.utmb.edu" and "www2.utmb.edu" are the same machines), please change it to "www2.utmb.edu/…" Referring to the former machine name will cause broken links when we consolidate our web servers.

The relocated webs will be accessible during the transition by keying in http://wahoo.utmb.edu/(your directory name). For example, the institutional policies, which were at http://www.utmb.edu/policy, are now also at http://wahoo.utmb.edu/policy.

User names and passwords for publishing access to these Wahoo webs will be the same as are used for UTMB-USERS-M, very likely the same as  current network and email passwords. There’ll be one less extra password to remember. FTP access has now also been established.

We’re hoping for a smooth transition, but are prepared for a few possible bumps. We promise to work with site publishers to make the change as painless and efficient as possible. In the end, we are certain that  publishers, and the viewers and users of their  pages, will benefit from what will be a more stable and speedy web hosting environment.

Call us if you have any questions or special concerns, if you need more information about a Bluefin site, or if we missed you in our initial transition. Thank you.

Pep Valdes (ext. 22618)
Don Brunder (ext. 28423)

Return to UTMB Home Page