Sprint 5 review

We've just reviewed a particularly long sprint.  Notes of the review are at http://imageweb.zoo.ox.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/ADMIRAL_SprintReview_5.

(We chose to run a long sprint with an intermediate review because we feel that having sprints less than 2 weeks creates too much planning overhead in our particular circumstances - reviewing and adjusting the plan half way through the sprint seems to be a workable compromise.)

The primary goal of the sprint was to complete deployment of a live ADMIRAL file sharing service for the Silk Group, based on a new virtual hosting environment.  We fell just short of that goal, mainly due to having to introduce new, unanticipated, access control mechanisms to handle the group's specific requirements.  But in the process of doing this, we seem to have developed a solution to a problem for which the conventional wisdom seems to be "you can't do that", viz. effective file access control for files that can be created via HTTP/WebDAV ''or'' locally or by CIFS. The new ingredient that makes this possible is Linux ACLs.

An initial draft security model for ADMIRAL has been created, though will surely benefit from review and revision as the project proceeds.

Maybe the biggest disappointment of this sprint was our failure to convene an intended monthly meeting, due primarily to unavailability of key partners, and possibly also because of not allowing enough lead time for planning.