Just a question. Maybe food for thought. Did you try restricting by IP range the site the colleges’ had access to?
What we did do, using Linode, was spin up VERY cheap entire instances for each class or student. By doing that, at least we could re-use StudentIDs and Password combos for each class, and each class had a unique IP address for its instance.
We had automated backups set up in each instance, too, and those we sent to a collection server for archiving or restoration.
Is that what you meant by IP segmentation?
The administration of IP addresses was not as easily/cheaply scalable as we had hoped, because we did not get reliable registration information for each class, nor email addresses to provide student passwords, until the start of each class (and those were subject to many changes in the first weeks of each course.) In fact, sometimes faculty was not even known until the start of class!
30 instances was a scramble; scaling to rapid launch of, say, 1,000 classes (10 per college per term for 100 colleges, for example) looked like a very, very steep and expensive climb!
Bigger platforms, like AWS, seemed at the time too risky. No real way that we could see at the time to prevent a student or group of students from gobbling up expensive, billable disk, communication, or CPU resources accidentally, such as trying to upload a massive federal data sample set just to see if/how it would work, OR running complex reports, graphics, and analytics on a public health dataset. (In fact, I did just that sort of “messing around” on Cornell’s IBM 370 in the 70s, and I still have the lashes to show for it!)
I’m hoping that this community is a lot smarter than me and my team were 5 years ago, and/or that the tools available today are a lot better!
Oh, and while I’m sharing, I saw some comments here and on OpenEMR asking for phpMyAdmin resources, and most seemed firmly denied. However, teaching computer science and software engineering students really requires some access to that. Again, that’s another reason to be prepared for damage control, and segregation of student, team, or course instances some of the time.
1 Like
Thanks for the information, This will be a help to us in our decision process. Thank you for sharing.
@ebsloane excellent feedback… @teryhill don’t we have someone working on a new reporting framework this summer ? — I think this would circumvent the myphpadmin Cos with number of scale then that’s an even bigger security risk
Maybe we can make sure this scale issue is addressed with the docker grant from dial @tony ? The person who probably tinkers most with servers etc would be @r0bby
@sunbiz any reactions ?
Yes we have a report generator in development. The main use for a PHPmyadmin like tool is database repairs and cleanup that needs to be done on most all systems.
Thanks for the excellent comments. I do have concern that everyone will want a customized educational EHR that suits them alone which is not reasonable or feasible
I like the idea of spinning up cheap instances… My idea is to have spin up instances using Kunersbernetes,…right now the educational EHRs are hosted on a separate subdomain and completely separate from the main demos and the URLs aren’t published beyond here on the forums. We can run separate containers per school. No customization for now…but I’m not opposed to it if the work isn’t insane. I’d spin up a Kubernetes cluster.
We should clean up and reset the database regularly. Docker will help with that, the current version is out of sync with master and has other issues as well. (like the log viewer doesn’t work at all).
@r0bby as going to install Adminer for data access… not sure why that did not happen yet…
I’ll go ahead and make all of the students inactive in the demo so they are not visible
Unless the base code is drastically different, I have no idea why someone would want to use separate instances instead of separate site directories and databases.
For demo purposes, we have a tool for saving/switching between databases within each site. It is crude in appearance (typical sysadmin dude did the coding) but it works. I have had no issue with supporting as many as 70 sites and separate databases running huge reports with a pretty minimal front end machine hooked to a (pretty decent) back-end database server machine hooked up by a second NIC (with some fancy port forwarding going on).Hmmm. Personally, I would suggest that folks hitting the demo should first land on a page that allows them to create a user. If they have an account, or have a group token, then they can get an existing database. Otherwise, when they sign up, a standard database and site directory is created. Then they don’t get stomped on when someone switches from Greek fonts back to Latin. You shouldn’t mix the two. It will make you a persona non-gratis among the Hoi Polloi.
@r0bby @tony @teryhill @aethelwulffe @sunbiz
Just a reminder that I will be presenting LibreHealth EHR in mid-June at the AMIA Informatics Educators Conference. My subject is really educational uses of an EHR, but I will use LibreHealth as an example. It would be great if we could finalize some of the administrative functions by, e.g. July, in case instructors in the audience would like to use it this summer or for the fall semester. At this point, Tony has been the only person to step forward for hosting at $150/month. I would like to be able to tell people what the game plan is for the educational version. I’ll continue to look for grant support.
2 Likes
Let me know what needs to be done besides installing Adminer
Fix the activity log please
Will look at the time install today and see what’s up
1 Like
Sorry, I am not attending the conference.
Ok. If you were able to attend I would have made you a co-presenter. I don’t know of another LibreHealth team member who is also an AMIA member and likely to attend this conference