ECCS2012 Makes PCs and Printers in Computer Labs
Accessible from Off-Campus Environment
Kazutaka Maruyama

Takayuki Sekiya

Information Technology Center
The University of Tokyo
2-11-16, Yayoi, BunkyoTokyo, 113-8658, Japan

Information Technology Center
The University of Tokyo
3-8-1, Komaba, Meguro
Tokyo, 153-8902, Japankazutaka@acm.org

sekiya@ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp

ABSTRACT
Information Technology Center, The University of Tokyo
provides Educational Campuswide Computing System (ECCS)
to approximately 60,000 users at our university. ECCS includes computer labs for class and self-study and a mail service for staﬀ and students. ECCS2012, launched in March2012, focuses on integrations of hardware and various channels to access the system. For example, a single kind ofterminals in the labs, an integrated file server for the terminals and the mail service, and a printing service portal whichconnects printers in the labs to oﬀ-campus PCs and terminals in the labs to oﬀ-campus printers in commercial stores.
In this paper, we describe the detail and usage statistics ofECCS2012.

ECCS2012, which was launched in March 2012, resolved
some problems of a prior ECCS, ECCS2008. The problemsof ECCS2008 were as follows:• there were two types of PC terminals for Mac OS Xand Windows,• there were three separate file servers, two for home
directories of PC terminals and one for a mail service,• a mail service consisted of two diﬀerent systems,• only a prepaid card was available for payment on a
printing service,• users oﬀ-campus could only use the mail service.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

In this paper, we describe how ECCS2012 resolved theseproblems, especially the improvement of services accessible
by oﬀ-campus users. The rest of this paper is organized asfollows. Section 2 describes an overview of ECCS2012 andsome subsystems of PC terminals, file servers, a mail service, and a printing service. Section 3 includes the services
for oﬀ-campus users, remote access to PC terminals, a printing portal, and payment on a printing service by e-money.
Section 4 summarizes our achievements and provides futurework.

K.6.2 [Management of Computing and Information
Systems]: Installation Management; K.6.4 [Managementof Computing and Information Systems]: System Management; H.4 [Information Systems Applications]: MiscellaneousKeywords
Educational computer system, Remote access, Remote desktop, Printing service, E-money

2.

1. INTRODUCTIONOVERVIEW OF ECCS2012
ECCS2012 includes following subsystems:

Information Technology Center, The University of Tokyo,
provides the Educational Campuswide Computing System(ECCS) for students and teaching and faculty staﬀ of theuniversity. Students and teaching staﬀ use ECCS for theirclasses, and faculty staﬀ use it to read and write e-mails andas a SSL-VPN gateway in order to access web pages only accessible from on-campus PCs. ECCS provides computer laband e-mail services to approximately 60,000 users.

• PC terminals for classes and private study of students,
and related management systems[4],• a mail service for the PC terminal users and mail hosting service users,• file servers for the PC terminals and the mail service,

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• a printing service[3],• authentication servers and a user management system,• network facilities and firewall equipment.
In this section, we describe some subsystems which improved considerably, but do not provide any oﬀ-campus services.

SIGUCCS’13, November 3–8, 2013, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Copyright 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-2318-5/13/11 ...$15.00.
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Replication(NAS storage only)
NASNAS

10GbpsNASヘッドheads
NASヘッドFigure 1 shows the structure of the ECCS2012 file servers.
EMC Symmetrix VMAX and Celerra VG8, as a primary fileserver, located at Komaba Campus in Tokyo, provides files
to the PCs and the mail servers via NFS and CIFS. The primary server also provides virtual disks for virtual machines
via Fiber Channel. EMC VNX 5700, as a secondary fileserver, located at Hongo Campus in Tokyo at a distance of9.5 kilometers from Komaba, receives replication data fromthe primary one. The primary server includes three diﬀerent types of drives. NAS heads of the server manage 110TB
storage, which is put into a single storage pool and whose
blocks are relocated automatically according to the statistics of accessing to them by EMC FAST VP. The featuresof the file servers are as follows.

NASヘッドheads
NASヘッドAutomaticdata
relocation
SSD
2TB
FC
48TB

NL-SAS
110TB

SATA
60TB+Primary file server

FC
6TB
VirtualNASヘッド
Machines
NASヘッドKomaba(Tokyo)

Secondary file server• Since the PCs and the mail service use the same storage pool, we can assign available free space to either
service.

Hongo(Tokyo)• A combination of diﬀerent types of drives keeps I/O
performance high and saves on installation and electricenergy consumption costs.

Figure 1: File servers of ECCS2012.

• A replication from the primary server to the secondary
one allows us to eliminate a backup server used in
ECCS2008 and gain the additional benefit of disasterrecovery (DR). Elimination of the backup server also
reduces the management cost of backup schedules tozero.

2.1 PC TerminalsPC terminals of ECCS2012 diﬀer from those of ECCS2008,because they are a single type hardware, Apple iMac, which
can run both Mac OS X and Windows by Boot Camp. There
are 1,300+ PCs located in classrooms and libraries of 18
buildings on three separate campuses, (1) Hongo, Tokyo,(2) Komaba, Tokyo, and (3) Kashiwa, Chiba. Since the six
full-time technical staﬀ that maintain them are located onlyon campuses (1) and (2), remote management systems arerequired. The following three management systems enable
us to update installed operating systems and applications,boot and shutdown terminals and maintain consistency.

2.3

Mail Services

ECCS2012 provides mail service to both users of the PCsand of a mail hosting service. The hosting service hosts numerous mail domains used in the university, which are typically sub domains of the university. In ECCS2008 we provided two diﬀerent types of mail servers to reduce the burden of users’ migration, but the TCO was extremely high.
In ECCS2012, we focused on reducing our TCO instead of
the burden of users and consolidated two mail servers into asingle type, DEEPSoft MailSuite. It runs on Linux, not anappliance, and includes not only daemon services for e-mails,
but also web mail, anti-virus, and anti-spam.

• Making an image of a master PC and distributing theimage to all other PCs in classrooms and libraries.
Canon IT Solutions Inc. provides these features to us
as a part of Total Manager for Mac. Total Manager
for Mac also enables us to boot and shutdown all thePCs remotely.

2.4

Printing Service

The ECCS printing service has provided on-demand printing and printing with a charge since 2004. On-demand printing in this paper (1) spools a printing job from a user first,and then (2) prints out the spooled job only when the user
who sent the job designates “really print” on a job handling
PC by the side of a printer. On-demand printing and printing with a charge reduce waste and encourage eager students
to promote their private study[2].
ECCS2012 provides multi-function printers (MFP) for thefollowing additional requirement of users.

• Installing and uninstalling separate OS updates andapplications into all the PCs by using Kaseya of Kaseya
Int’l Ltd.
• Keeping the content of PCs stable. Deep Freeze ofFaronics Corporation is installed on both Mac OS Xand Windows partitions.

2.2 File Servers
ECCS2012 requires network attached storage for both thePCs and the mail service. The PCs store users’ own files inhome directories via NFS from Mac OS X and CIFS fromWindows. The mail service, which consists of eight separate
Linux servers with a load balancer, also stores mail spools
and personal settings of users via NFS. Since ECCS2008
included three discrete file servers, two for the PCs and one
for the mail service, the total cost of ownership (TCO) was
rather high and any available free space could not be used by
the other file servers. ECCS2012 uses a single high-end fileserver with high performance, availability, and reliability asa primary file server, instead of three mid-range file servers.

• Digitizing paper materials using an automatic document feeder and an OCR unit.
• Directly printing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files onusers’ own USB sticks using job handling PCs, eliminating the need to first log into the PC terminals.
A preview of the files appears before printing so thatusers can check the compatibility of MS Oﬃce on thejob handling PC.
All other features of the printing service are described insection 3.2.

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Users'own PC
HTTPS
Session management
serverHTTPS, ssh...

...
30 Mac minis forremote access system

Figure 3: Top 30 of total login time.

Figure 2: Remote access system of ECCS2012.
Mac minis are too many because the maximum number ofsimultaneous login users is only eight.

3. ACCESS FROM OFF-CAMPUS

3.2

Most services of ECCS2008 could not be remotely accessed by oﬀ-campus users. Now, ECCS2012 makes thegraphical desktop of the PC terminals and the printing service remotely accessible to promote greater use of our system.

Printing Portal and Payment by E-money

The printing service is connected to oﬀ-campus resources
to allow users to do the following:
1. Printing their jobs to oﬀ-campus printers, provided by
Net Print Service described below, in the same way as
to on-campus printers,

3.1 Remote Access to PC Terminals
Since applications highly specialized for classes are installed on the PC terminals of ECCS, students are required
to come to classrooms or libraries with the terminals when
they want to use these applications. ECCS2008 provided
only ssh remote access based on a command line method.
Graphical applications were available on-campus only. The
remote access system of ECCS2012 focuses on providing access to these graphical applications to both students at homeand part-time lecturers in their own oﬃces without any special clients.
The remote access system consists of 30 Mac minis anda session management server at a server room (Figure 2).
Mac OS X provides a VNC server feature and is alreadyaccessible remotely. Guacamole[1] enables Mac OS X to beaccessible by standard web browsers with HTML5. Therefore, the remote access system requires no additional clients.
The session management server acts as a mediator between
users’ own PCs and the Mac minis. When a user accesses alogin page on the server with his/her browser and succeeds
in logging into a session, the server picks an available Macmini from its pool and assigns it to the user. Once the assignment is made, the user’s browser displays the Mac mini
screen with the standard login window of Mac OS X. He/Sheenters his/her user name and password again to log into
Mac OS X. If the authentication succeeds, his/her desktop,
the same as what appears on the PC terminals, appears in
his/her browser. When a session unexpectedly disconnects,
the server clears the session information and forces the Macmini to reboot through a ssh connection at which point it isput back into the pool.
1,584 unique users have logged into the remote access system. Figure 3 shows the top 30 of total login time. There
are a few heavy users and many light users. About 15% ofsource IPs are on-campus and 85% are oﬀ-campus. The 30

2. Sending print jobs from their own PCs at home or
research laboratory to on-campus printers,
3. Paying for printing charges with e-money.
The first and the second above correspond with (1) and(2) in Figure 4 respectively. A printing portal located in Fuji
Xerox DC (oﬀ-campus) is connected with our printing job
spooler via VPN and mediates between on- and oﬀ-campus
resources. The PC terminals and the users’ own PCs witha special printer driver can send a print job to the printing
portal. The driver can be set to direct the portal to either
send the job to the on-campus spooler and/or the oﬀ-campus
MFPs. The driver is provided by Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., which
operates Net Print Service (NPS) and the MFPs at 7-Eleven
Japan stores. NPS is an independent commercial service. If
a user uses NPS, he/she does a free registration of NPS,
uploads his/her file to NPS via web browsers, and can print
it at any 7-Eleven Japan store. ECCS users who wish toprint at 7-Eleven stores, need to register NPS and set up
the printer driver prior to sending a printing job.
The only printing payment method in ECCS2008 was
1,000 yen prepaid cards. The ECCS2012 printing service
accepts e-money, Suica, as well as prepaid cards. Suica, aprepaid and rechargeable e-money card, was developed by
East Japan Railway Company, a.k.a. JR East. Since Suicaand Suica compatible IC card, are widely used at railway
stations and commercial stores in Japan, most students already have these cards. If a user wants to print out only afew pages, all he/she has to do is to put his/her Suica on areader connected with on-campus MFPs. There is no needto purchase a prepaid card.
The number of printing jobs sent to the printing portal is1,285 from March 2012 to March 2013. About 9% of them107

(1)Printing job spooler

(1)
(2)
(3)
On-campus
MDFPC terminal(2)(2) (3)Off-campus equipments
cooperating with ECCS2012
(2)
(3)

(3)
Users' own
PCPrinting portal
in Fuji Xerox DC

Off-campus MDF
in 7-Eleven Japan(1) On-campus to on-campus(2) On-campus to Printing portal (sent to both on- and off-campus)(3) Off-campus to Printing portal (sent to both on- and off-campus)

Figure 4: Printing job flows of ECCS2012.
Figure 5: Details of payment methods.
are jobs sent to NPS. The percentage is low because the NPS
service charges 20 yen per an A4 monochrome page, double
the cost of printing on-campus. NPS may be too expensive for students who do have a less expensive alternative.
About 68% of source IPs of connections to the portal areon-campus. This includes users’ own PCs connected to theuniversity’s Wi-Fi service and PCs located in research laboratories. 32% are located oﬀ-campus. These users installthe driver on their own PCs and can then send printing jobs
to on-campus MFPs.
Figure 5 shows details of payment methods from May 2012
to March 2013. The total printed using prepaid cards is726,543 pages and the total for e-money is 704,846 pages.
The number of pages paid for by e-money appears to beincreasing, but the prepaid cards total is still higher. One
reason may be that a 1,000 yen prepaid card includes a print
allowance equivalent to 1,050 yen.

5.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to NEC Corporation, Canon IT Solutions Inc.,and Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd. for supporting us in implementing
and operating the remote access system and the printing
service of the ECCS2012.

6.

REFERENCES[1] Guacamole - HTML5 Clientless Remote Desktop.
http://guac-dev.org/.
[2] K. Ando and T. Sekiya. New Approach for Printing
System Management in University Environment. In
The Special Interest Group Technical Reports of IPSJ,
volume 2005, pages 13–16, 2005. (In Japanese).
[3] K. Maruyama and T. Sekiya. Printing Service for
Educational Computer System in Cooperation withOﬀ-campus Services. In The Special Interest Group
Technical Reports of IPSJ, volume 2012-IOT-16, 2012.
(In Japanese).
[4] K. Maruyama, T. Sekiya, T. Imogawa, and Y. Wada.
Agent Based Management of Dual Boot PC Terminals
in Classrooms. In Proceedings of Internet andOperation Technology Symposium 2012, pages 39–46,
2012. (In Japanese).

4. SUMMARY
In this paper, we provide an overview of ECCS2012, especially the ability to connect to oﬀ-campus resources, such as
the remote access system, the printing portal, and e-money.
These services increase usefulness for users. The complexityof the system, however, increases and makes solving problems harder. We will continue to measure the usage of services and provide feedback on the next ECCS.

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