Suggestion:

Since the student members of the group are on campus a lot, maybe we can recruit their help to investigate the connectivity problems?

They could check the on-campus wifi, with and without the VPN.

List of Quickloads:

• https://data.bioviz.org/quickload/
• http://igbquickload.org/quickload/
• http://lorainelab-quickload.scidas.org/quickload/
• https://quickload.bioviz.org/quickload/

Check if you can reach these sites on:

• Home internet
• VPN
• UNC Charlotte Campus
• EduRoam
• Ninerwifi-PSK (Kannapolis Office) -> not supposed to be used by students
• Ninerwifi-guest
• NCRC Guest

• Home internet: All OK.
• VPN (from home and from campus, on personal computer and computer lab computer): I am unable to access http://igbquickload.org/quickload/
• EduRoam: I am unable to access http://igbquickload.org/quickload/ consistently and am unable to access https://data.bioviz.org/quickload/ intermittently.
• Campus EduRoam (on campus computer): I am unable to access http://igbquickload.org/quickload/ consistently and am unable to access https://data.bioviz.org/quickload/ intermittently.
• Campus EduRoam (on personal computer): All OK.
• NinerWiFi-Guest (on campus computer): I am unable to access http://igbquickload.org/quickload/ consistently.
• NinerWiFi-Guest (on personal computer): All OK.
• NCRC Guest: All OK.

On Nowlan's Macbook Pro 2017
NCRC Guest: All work
NinerWifi-PSK: All work
EduRoam - All work
VPN from NCRC Guest - All work except http://igbquickload.org/quickload/

I have sent Michael Cowan an email summarizing these connectivity issues:

Hi Michael,

I'm having issues connecting to a website that you helped our group (the Loraine Lab) troubleshoot previously. I'm on a University managed laptop and am unable to connect to one of our data repositories (http://igbquickload.org/quickload/) with certain internet connections. So far, I've found that I'm able to load that website on my home wifi, NCRC Guest, and NinerWiFi-Guest, but I'm unable to load it using eduroam or the campus VPN (vpn.uncc.edu). My colleague who is not using a University-managed laptop has also had issues accessing that website but only while using the VPN.

It's really important that I can get this fixed since I'll be doing presentations on campus in the future and I want to make sure that I won't have any connectivity issues when I do so.

Let me know what other information I can provide that might be helpful!

Cheers,
Paige

For internal network mapping of the bioviz.org domain, Dr. Loraine had set up a CNAME record. Michael suggests that creating a new CNAME record for igbquickload.org will allow anybody on any network to access it. To do this, we can submit a DNS ticket here and Network Services will help us get it set up.

Submitted ticket to Network Services:

Hello!

Previously you helped me set up an internal network configuration for data.bioviz.org, a data delivery web site needed for software my lab develops called Integrated Genome Browser.

Could you help me do that now for igbquickload.org?

The way we did before is that I made CNAME record for the domain named "entry_for_mapping_data_bioviz_cname.uncc.edu" and a TXT record named "dnsauth.bioviz.org" with value "vymyqqsnc2hnx2pr2w7clrm7zdl16mfq". I can't recall the details for exactly how this worked, but I think this setup enabled a DNS service hosted at the University (dnsauth.bioviz.org) to become the authority on IP addresses for the domain data.bioviz.org.

The public IP address of IGBQuickload.org is 152.15.236.217, and its internal address is the same as what is being used for data.bioviz.org, as both sites are being hosted on the same VM.

Thank you very much for your help!

Ann Loraine
Professor
Bioinformatics and Genomics

Eduroam (campus computer):
http://igbquickload.org/quickload/ did not load on the main campus
https://data.bioviz.org/quickload/ took a long time to load but eventually loaded
Eduroam (with VPN campus computer):
http://igbquickload.org/quickload/ did not load

Eduroam (personal computer):
all websites loaded
Eduroam (with VPN personal computer):
all websites loaded

NinerWiFi-Guest (campus computer):
http://igbquickload.org/quickload/ did not load on the main campus
NinerWifi-Guest (with VPN campus computer):
http://igbquickload.org/quickload/ did not load on the main campus

NinerWifi-Guest (personal computer):
all websites loaded
NinerWifi-Guest (with VPN personal computer):
all websites loaded

Summary of what we've found so far:

Overall: igbquickload.org/quickload/ cannot be consistently accessed by students or staff, and data.bioviz.org/quickload/ can be quite slow to load on with Eduroam.

Staff findings: Staff are unable to access igbquickload.org/quickload/ using the VPN. I (Paige) am unable to access that site on my work computer at the NCRC campus using Eduroam, however I am able to access that site using Eduroam on my work computer at the main campus. This may be related to the University-managed laptop I'm using, but I'm not sure. Finally, the rest of my findings from my visit to campus were the same as Dylan's.

Student findings: Students (+Paige) are unable to access igbquickload.org/quickload/ using either of the available WiFi's (Eduroam, NinerWiFi-Guest) on campus computers, but they can access that site with either internet connection on their personal computers.

MC=main campus
CC=campus computer
x=working
o=intermittent
NW=not working

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hMMw9SKpGGd9fNSyPscqeF8pcXwh5bXXx4xYna8ACuw/edit?usp=sharing

My attempt at summarizing the above findings by Paige, Dylan, and Nowlan

Thank you for the summary Nowlan Freese - it is very helpful!

A couple of questions for NF:

• Clarification question: If a cell in the table is empty that means the actually was a result and the result was: "not working" ? If so, maybe instead of an empty cell, how about about "NW" for "not working."

(When I saw the empty cell, I thought that meant the combination had not been tested.)

• A technical question: For "campus computer," are we sure the person using it was able to connect using eduroam and not wired internet? If it was a computer lab computer for example, it might not be possible for an ordinary user to modify the internet settings. Maybe we need to clarify what "campus computer" means with respect to the internet connection - I assume it was ethernet?

Answer: "campus computer" = computer lab computer

Moving to Done as we have investigated the issues with network connectivity.

Ann spoke at length with Loren Striegel a network admin at UNC Charlotte after submitting a trouble ticket.

It turns out there were a number of internal network records associated with igbquickload and bioviz URLs. We were not able to figure out why some computers on some networks could not retrieve content from igbquickload hosted on the main campus infrastructure.

I added some screen captures images to this ticket showing Loren's network visualization software.

I'm on campus again and re-tried several combinations of computer+connection to try and load the various IGB Quickloads.

Connecting to igbquickload.org/quickload did NOT work on Eduroam on my laptop
Connecting to data.bioviz.org DID work on my laptop after a minute or two.
Connecting to igbquickload.org/quickload DID work on Niner-WiFi Guest.
Connecting to igbquickload.org/quickload DID work on Eduroam on my laptop this second time around.