Free-Standing new EaaSI

EAASI Research Alliance Legacy Grant Phase
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Hi
I’m playing with the new Hosted Node and it is really fun.

It is also really slow in Australia. Really have to tease the mouse to clickable buttons.

I think I’m going to have to share with my case study people a free-standing EaaSI, until we get our node up in Oz.

When it comes out, can you point out to me the download link? Is it up now?

Thanks!
Cynde

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@tim.mifsud how are you finding it?

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@Cynde_Moya this may surprise you, but I haven’t been able to put other work aside just yet to jump in and start work on it. I plan to try tomorrow (Friday 28 May 2021). I have been too busy spruiking emulation on the local instance single laptop version to the NAA business areas i see it could be used in.

I’ll be sure to keep you posted. Am I correct in noting you have had some issues?

Tim

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I just did a quick 2-min test of the Windows 95 OSR2 environment and I have found the mouse from my work desktop to be quite laggy. I can see how this will be an issue for you given mouse response time is crucial for video gaming.
In my use case, response time, while frustrating is not as crucial as we are using it to access objects which are not input-time sensitive like video games can be.

I wonder what your internet provider PING is and if that affects it. Seems from my desktop my ping times at the NAA are abysmal at 371ms so that may explain the lag.

regards,
Tim

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Hi @Cynde_Moya and @tim.mifsud! Indeed, apologies for the unideal performance, but the hosted service, including the NAA and AARNet’s nodes, is currently deployed on U.S.-based cloud infrastructure, so this is not surprising. Tim’s correct, your specific ISP’s performance will certainly be a factor - my own ping to hosted.eaasi.cloud is about 43ms right now, on the best possible plan that Comcast offers to our home, though there are certainly times that fluctuates and things like mouse input or even uploads get interrupted (luckily, I have a a remote desktop from Yale that I can log in to complete larger uploads with more stability). However, at a certain point we will always be fighting physics when streaming emulator input/output to Australia.

Given the delays in launching the hosted nodes, our priority was getting the service up in some form for all pilot participants - but we could now potentially pursue alternative arrangements to improve performance for the hosted service pilot in Australia. At least on my end, I would have some questions about how alternative deployments would intersect with sharing and saving software from other EaaSI nodes. I would suggest that the Australian and EaaSI teams should try to have a dedicated conversation about all this soon - I’ll raise it with Jessica as soon as she’s available and see if we can get all the necessary players into a thread together!

Re: deploying the code from the hosted service on your own server or free-standing on a single laptop/desktop, I don’t believe the necessary adjustments have been made yet to the public eaasi-installer to make that possible. I’ll try to get an updated timetable on that and give that info at the monthly node call next week, and will certainly link you to it specifically when it’s available @Cynde_Moya!

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Sounds great Ethan! I certainly see application within the NAA for having a number of configurations available. They are as follows:

  • Free standing non-networked version (aka loaded to a single standalone machine) - this would be used at NAA to sit in our secure room for access examination purposes. The NAA must declassify records upon request of the public, and we cannot put unclassified or security classified material into any sort of networked system.

Once declassified:

  • On-premise server client version for internal sharing and internal description work and management of objects prior to public release.

When ready for public release:

  • Load the objects into public version of Preservica, and have a version of EaaSI tied to Preservica, so the public can access declassified and open digital objects in their native environments.

For NAA staff sharing software and environments with other nodes, and making it so those environments can easily be loaded to the non-networked versions listed above:

  • The cloud-based version of EaaSI

At this stage I think the NAA is likely to be most interested in the on-premise options because there are rules in Australia about loading anything from our collection into a product which has its cloud hosted outside of Australia.

As an aside, my ping time at home is 8ms. I use the business plan from Superloop @Cynde_Moya . Superloop is an awesome provider. Lots of great NBN plans. I am on a fibre to my garage (next to my ethernet wired study) connection though.

I am going to perserve with the cloud-hosted pilot despite the lag. I am trying to do it from home. Only hiccup so far is downloading the sample corpus, where certain items do not download initially. Partly due to Google Drive size limits and I have only one file left I cannot obtain at all, but I’m not worried at this stage. My virus checker is not letting me download the /images/windows/windows_for_workgroups_311 base as it says it has a virus in it.

Other than that, I’ll keep you all posted. I’ve made a video of my experiences for the NAA, but at this stage I can’t share until it has been cleared by my superiors.

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Oh and @Cynde_Moya, I am now using a Logitech G305 gaming mouse with super high poll rate and it makes my user experience of EaaS much improved. Well worth the $AUD40

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This is a great tip, I never thought of the speed of the mouse. But of course it is part of the viewpath which parameters are important to consider.

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my ping time from home is 219ms. 8(

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219ms ping! Sorry to hear that is the case @Cynde_Moya