Procedia Computer Science 3 (2011) 805–808 Procedia Computer Science 00 (2009) 000–000
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WCIT-2010
Open source software usage on municipalities; a case study: Çankaya municipality Vahabdjanov Dilmurada*, Erzurumlu Kerema, Çitak Muratb, Solmaz B. Samib a
Hacettepe University Computer Engineering Department, 06532 Ankara, Turkey b Çankaya Municipality, Kolej Ankara, Turkey
Abstract As well known, the Open Source Software becomes the leading information technology day by day. There are open source alternatives of the most of the commercial softwares. In this case study, we will examine the open source software usage on the biggest municipality of Turkey; Çankaya Municipality. The IT department of the municipality uses open source software for various reasons and various places. The usage area includes both servers with internet services and desktop usage. In scope of this paper, the reasons of open source software selection and their usage places will be explained in detail for a case study. Keywords: Municipality, Open-Source Software, N-Tier Architecture, Web Based, 3-Tier Architecture, Modern Software Architecture
c 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license. ⃝ Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the Guest Editor.
1. Introduction Today, with the rapidly develping technology, the life of the citizens requires more efficient ways to use their time on business and government related operations. The growing cities and municipalities makes harder for municipality to operate, coordination between the branches and serve to it’s citizens. In order to deal with these problems, municipalities must modernize it’s structure and develop e-government solutions. E-government is the use of information technology to enable and improve the efficiency with which government services are provided to citizens, employees, businesses and agencies. In this concept, e-government systems through citizen-focused service offering a country to become the work place, the citizens, the easiest and most efficient, high quality, fast, seamless and secure electronic service aims. A universal standard of the municipality operations does not seem to exist. So each municipality has to develop it’s own solution. The improvement will occur by the automation of the communication processes that take place between the citizens and the local administration which includes electronic services. 2. The Project of Migration to Open Source Software In 2006 the Çankaya Municipality of Ankara (Turkey) started to implement open source software due to a total change of working architecture. Between years 1996 and 2006 Çankaya Municipality had used Main Frame and dump terminals. The terminal count is raised by multiplexers and remote branches are connected via 33Kbps end-to-
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Vahabdjanov Dilmurad. Tel.: +90-312-2977500; fax: +90-312-2977502 E-mail address:
[email protected]
c 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license. 1877-0509 ⃝ doi:10.1016/j.procs.2010.12.132
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end modems. Hence the software had run on Main Frame, only authorized and connected users has access to system. So the citizens whose has a issue about the municipality phisically must go to one of the branches or the headquarters. In 2006, it has been decided to replace the existing Main Frame due to “High Operating Cost” and “Lack of Spare Parts”[1]. Çankaya Municipality’s IT department decided to hit two birds with one stone and the change of architecture is also planned. The IT department decided to jump to multi-tier architecture and not to use server-client nor main frame architecure[2]. A multi-tier architecture helps separate the responsibilities and the implementation between the applications, generic services components and the data repository. On the Çankaya, 3-tier architecture is selected: the application tier, the common services tier and the infrastructure data tier. The software applications distrubuted across municipal departments. The common services provide workflow managment components that layer with the integrated data repository. The infrastructure data tier is implemented using a centralized Database Managment Systems. In this plan, it is decided to use “Open Source Software” as many as possible. 3. Migration Motives The Çankaya Municipality decided to encourage open source software and open standards in particular due to the following reasons: x Free software allows Chankaya to decrease dependence on software vendors, x The possibility to integrate applications from third-party software vendors is only possible to a very limited degree in proprietary software, while such integration and customisation is unlimited with free software, x Proprietary software vendors need a long time period to enhance their applications, x License costs for proprietary software products are high, in particular due to recent changes of the license structure and policies of major vendors, x Open Standards are the presupposition for collaboration with other municipalitys in the future. Common projects can be realised by the use of open standards.
4. The Process First the Oracle 10g licence which is obtained before the project is used on a 4 processor server which has operating system Suse Enterprise Linux[3,4]. In the middle stage, the municipality’s software are re-writen according to the 3-tier-architecture. On second stage, an LDAP service is constructed in Çankaya Municipality with using of OpenLDAP[5]. These services includes user authentication, authorization and access. After the setting and calibrating of users to LDAP, the general Internet services like HTTP, SMTP, DNS and NTP is founded. For all of these services, Open Source Operating Systems are preffered and decided to use CentOS Operating System[6]. For HTTP service, Apache Software Foundation’s “Apache Web Server” is used with PHP module[7,8]. For SMTP service, Qmail is used with LDAP, ClamAV and Spamassassin plugins[9,10,11]. For DNS service, Internet Systems Consorsium’s “Bind” is used[12]. In the name of using the internet more efficiently and blocking the illegal sites which is listed on Turkish Laws, web caching software “Squid” is used with Ufdbguard[13,14]. For secure branch and administrator access, “OpenVPN” is used[15]. On third stage, the dump terminals replaced with specially costimized thin clients. These thin clients expecially build for Çankaya Municipality and does not require a server to operate. P”Z”I code named devices has a build in operating system which supports all the printers on the municipality and prints documents which has specified extensions directly without user interferance. These thin clients also has the capability of establishing VPN directly to the VPN server which helps that the branch’s setup to made easyly[16]. On the last stage, the Çankaya Municipality’s employee’s workstations operating system is begun to replace with Pardus Linux[17]. Firstly the “Directorate of Construction Affairs” department is converted and the employee’s on the department is trained for Pardus Linux as a test bed. Although the results are promissing in technical ways, due to human nature
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resistance, other departments conversion is “on-hold” for now. 5. The Acquisitions The first gain of the municipality is “cost of the server operating systems”. All the servers in municipality runs on Linux based operating systems and they never had a fault which is caused by operating system. The administration of these systems made by municipality’s IT specialists. When the convertion on “Construction Affairs” done, the technical support required by this department is decreased to 23,12 request/day from 42,64 request/day. As the technical reports inspected, most of the requests are like “I can not find XYZ program on this operating system. Where is it?” 6. The Negative Side The 12 month run on Çankaya Municipality with open source software shows that open source software usage would also bring some disadvantages. The disadvantages, according to Çankaya, are as follows. x Numerous applications are written for MS Windows and are not compatible with open source operating systems, x Hardware drivers are not always available for GNU/Linux based systems, x A software developer who is specialised in programming with/for open source software is not easy to find, x Not working of some complementary software applications’ with GNU/Linux limits the use of open source software, x The variety of software that works with open source operating systems is significantly lower compared with what is available today for Microsoft Windows. 7. Conclusion Nevertheless, the Çankaya Municipality believes that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and believes that with time and increasing open source adoption, the disadvantages will reduce to a insignigficant partion.
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Foxnews.com, pp. -.Retrieved Feb 7, 2008, from Fox News 19. R. J. Carey. Department of the Navy Open Source Software Guidance (-). Washington, DC: U.S. Navy. Retrieved Fab 8, 2008, from Open Source Software Institute 20. David J. Ward, Eris Y.Tao. Open Source Software Use in Municipal Goverment: Is full immersion possible?, WCECS 2009, October 20-22, 2009, San Frabcisco, USA 21. Bertrand Marquet, Laurent Ballester, Towards a new architecture of security services, DNAC’99, Paris, Dec.1999 22. Visolve Squid Team, Transparent Cache, 2002
