2013-09-26: DRMFSS IT Infrastructure Assesment

• There are two bandwidth sources at DRMFSS Ghandi data center (WoredaNet and Commercial subscription)
• The goal is to utilize both sources to access CATS server. WoredaNet allows users from Regions to use CATS without going to the public internet since the network infrastructure is already in place. The commercial line is a bit larger (10MB) and allows users outside of WoredaNet to access CATS from anywhere through the public internet.
• The required configuration is to route requests from both sources to the same servers/services.

• At the moment http://www.dppc.gov.et domain is used by DRMFSS to serve up its website
• There are four configuration options:
  
  
  1. Own Domain: Use http://pilot.catsproject.org: This configuration requires recording of DNS entry both at Ethio Telecom and the domain name registrar.
     1. Advantage: Creation of SSL certificate simpler (resolves current issues with lack of access to specific email addresses with dppc.gov.et)
     2. Disadvantage: Ongoing payment for the domain (godaddy.com)
     3. Disadvantage: .org HLD not acceptable for a government system - should be .gov.et
     4. Disadvantage: requires ETC intervention to configure DNS records
        
        
  2. Subdomain: In order to use sub-domains (e.g. http://cats.dppc.gov.et) DRMFSS needs to request Ethio Telecom to configure DNS records on their servers so that traffic will go to the appropriate server at DRMFSS data center.
     1. Advantage: consistent domain naming
     2. Advantage: no ongoing payment
     3. Disadvantage: requires ETC intervention to configure DNS records
        
        
  3. Virtual Directory: To use url such as http://www.dppc.gov.et/cats to access CATS. This is the easiest to configure since there is no external dependency (Ethio Telecom or third part domain registrar). How it works is whenever a request comes in to the above url, the server will redirect it to CATS server (since we have different servers for the website and CATS). Immediately the request is redirected CATS server can start serving the request. The downside to it is since CATS server only has Public IP and no associated domain/sub-domain name users will see IP address instead of a human readable address (http://213.55.64.71/earlywarning/request). If we are to host both (website and CATS) on the same server then both can use the dppc.gov.et domain rather than the IP address.
     1. Disadvantage: any configuration change will break CATS
        
        
  4. Own DNS Server: To configure and manage a dedicated DNS server at DRMFSS. This option requires the most work from part of DRMFSS IT since managing and maintaining a DNS server requires a dedicated personnel and frequent housekeeping

Recommended option: No. 2 or 3

• DRMFSS currently uses bare-metal configurations for all its servers
• CATS installation is no different that there is one physical server to host both the web server and database
• Virtualizing the server is a better way to go both in terms of utilizing the available resources (compute and storage) and making it easy for recovery and scalability