Dear Radboudumc DRE user,
Until November of last year, RTC Data Stewardship sent out regular information emails to a group of key users of the Digital Research Environment. These emails have since stopped for several reasons, but we would like to bring them back for a wider audience, to keep you informed about changes to the DRE.
We have chosen to send this first message out to all DRE users associated with Radboudumc (i.e., with a Radboudumc email address associated with their mydre-account), because it contains important information for all users. We currently do not have an official mailing list available for which you can (un)subscribe, so please be patient. As soon as we have one in place, you will have the opportunity to opt out of receiving our DRE updates. For now, we will make sure not to send these emails often, and if possible only to workspace owners.
The topics in this newsletter:
- Number matching at login
- Proxy issues
- TIP: reducing costs in DRE
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Number matching at login
As of February 27th 2023, Microsoft's Multifactor Authentication through the Authenticator app will change for all Microsoft accounts, from a simple approval to a method called number matching. This method can already be used, and anDREa has chosen to get ahead of the curve and enforce number matching from Monday December 12th onwards.
What will change for me?
If you currently have authentication via sms enabled, nothing will change.
If you currently use the Microsoft Authenticator app to log in to the DRE, the procedure will change slightly. After filling in your username and password, a two-digit number will appear on your computer screen. Tap on the Microsoft Authenticator notification on your phone or open the app, and fill in this two-digit number. You should then be logged in successfully.
Proxy issues
As communicated last November to all workspace owners, anDREa has pushed proxy settings to all our virtual machines (VMs) to enable the use of their latest feature, domain-based internet access. Because this is not yet a self-service option (but has to be requested through a ticket on the support website), we asked anDREa to postpone any major related changes until the feature was improved. Unfortunately, the proxy change was pushed without our knowledge, resulting in some internet-based services to no longer be available. In addition, the change was rather forcefull and reapplied several times per day, which meant that the manual fixes we offered earlier had to be applied again and again.
Although the proxy settings will not be revoked centrally, they will now only be applied once on every new VM. That means that any manual changes you make to the proxy settings of your VM will no longer be overwritten. In addition, anDREa has provided an article explaining how to change the proxy settings if you find services, such as blob storage, to no longer be available to you:
myDRE support | Search Proxy.
TIP: Reducing costs in DRE
As with most things, workspaces cost money. To promote use of workspaces we cover all costs below 20EUR/month centrally, so you only pay what you use extra. Keeping your monthly bill below this number will ensure you will not get billed for your workspace. In addition, we find there are many workspaces that see little to no activity – this is not a problem now, but may force us to reconsider the discount in the future when more and more abandoned workspaces are idling like that.
Here are a few tips to keep your workspaces low in costs:
1) Use the right tools
Choose the right size virtual machine (VM) for your work – B-series VMs (the default) are good for burstable workloads such as those generated with many desktop applications. If you plan to run longer computational jobs, it is better to choose one of the other types, e.g. D or E-series – a VM that runs out of its bursting budget will be severely reduced in speed.
More CPUs will not always help you. Often the extra CPUs are idling and will not contribute much to your sense of speed. You can check CPU usage in the Windows task manager as follows:
Hit ctrl+shift-escape in your VM, go to the performance tab and examine CPU/memory usage. Right-click the CPU graph and select ‘change graph to -> local processors’ to see what each individual core is doing. If you see many cores not doing a lot of work, you can probably save money by choosing fewer CPUs.
If you need to store a lot of data but do not intend to use it constantly, it can help creating a blob storage in your workspace and moving your files there. Blob storage is not directly accessible from your VMs (you need an application like Azure Storage Explorer), but it is a lot cheaper. If you just want to use the storage as backup which you will likely never need to recover, there is even an archive mode for blob storage which again is much cheaper. Read more here:
2) Scale down
Though tempting to keep using the same VM configuration, it helps with costs if you scale down a VM once computations are done. The VM will need to be restarted for that, but you can save money this way by not having idle resources.
3) Shut it down
Do not just shut down your VM from within Windows or Linux – the machine will remain running and costs will keep ramping up. Instead, turn the machine off by using the stop-button in the myDRE Portal.
Make use of the auto-shutdown feature on each VM to avoid them running longer than you intended (note that auto-shutdown is set to 7 p.m. on newly created machines by default). If you click on a VM in the myDRE Portal, you will see a clock symbol at the top where you can adjust the time the VM shuts down (see also
Adjusting the auto-shutdown of a VM).
If you are done with your workspace, please create a support ticket at
https://support.mydre.org to have your workspace deleted. If you don’t want to go this route, because you want to be able to keep accessing the data (or later re-start your research) make sure to at least delete all virtual machines in the workspace and (optionally) move the data to archive blob (see 1).