SAHARA Labs / News: Recent posts

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** SAHARA Labs r3.3-ANDS_Research **

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Introduction

Sahara Labs is a software suite that helps to enable remote
access to computer controlled laboratories. It is designed
to be a scalable, stable platform that enables the use and
sharing of a variety of types of remote laboratories and
maximises remote lab usage by implementing queuing and
booking (or reservations) for users over a group of
identical laboratories. ... read more

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-- New and Noteworthy: --

• Reservation system - an all new reservation system has
  been implemented. This allows users to make reservations
  for a single rig, any rig of a rig type, or any rig with
  a specific capability. The features of this are:

  - Permissions may be setup in queuing, reservation
          or queuing and reservation mode.
  - Reservations are made in 15 minute increments. The 
          reservation length is user selectable from 15 minutes
          to permission allowed duration + time extensions.
  - Reservations are early assigning to make sure a
          rig is kept for the reservation, and late binding to
          handle rigs going off-line or more specific reservations
          requesting the rig. This allows the reservation to 
          float around the rigs which satisfy the reservation
          constraints until final redemption time when it is
          'bound' to a specific rig.
  - The number of reservations a user makes is limited to a 
          permission allowing a fixed number of concurrent reservations. 
          After this is exceeded the user must either finish or
          cancel the existing reservations before they can create
          more reservations.
  - On a permission basis a 'time horizon' can be set which is 
          a traveling offset from the current time. This stops the 
          abuse of the reservation system short-cutting the queuing
          system.
  - Users receive email confirmations of reservation creation,
          cancellations and one hour before reservation start.
  

• Rig Administrative dashboard - shows all rigs statuses filtered
  by type.

  - The rig statuses are shown such as 'alarmed', 'online', 
          'offline', 'not registered' & 'in session' (the 'alarmed'
          state is for a rig that is offline but not in a offline 
          period).
  - In progress session may be terminated.
  - Recent rig status changes are show. To determine if a rig
          has been operating correctly and accessible.
  - Offline periods can be scheduled for the rig. During these
          periods the rig will not be reservable or online to queue for.
  

• Rig Client administrative interface - an online interface
  resident on the rig client, allowing:

  - Status and exerciser tests to be viewed
  - Configuration to be changed
  - Logs to be viewed
  - Diagnostics to be viewed
  - Embedded documentation to be downloaded... [read more](/p/labshare-sahara/news/2011/02/sahara-labs-v3-released/)