Service-Enhancements

Project Pythia and the “Jupyter notebook obsolescence” problem # Project Pythia provides educational resources for essential software tools that enable open, reproducible and scalable geoscience, such as the Pangeo stack of packages (Xarray, Dask, Jupyter).

Last December I had an opportunity to discuss the current and future state of the open publishing ecosystem at a workshop hosted by HHMI1. While 2i2c doesn’t primarily focus on “publishing” workflows, we do support communities on a journey that often leads to publishing, and we make choices about technology in our community hub platform that can support different kinds of publishing outcomes.

2i2c are pleased to announce the development and deployment of automated backups of home directories on GCP-hosted hubs! We have developed the gcp-filestore-backups project that regularly creates backups of JupyterHub home directories for disaster recovery purposes.

When sharing a storage disk between users, as is usually the case in a JupyterHub deployment, it is important to put in guardrails so that one user cannot eat up the whole storage capacity from the rest of the users.

We are excited to announce that all 2i2c hubs now run JupyterHub 5.0! This is an upgrade that brings some exciting new features and improvements. Some of the highlights include:

2i2c is pleased to announce the frx-challenges project, a new open source tool to help communities host data challenges on shared infrastructure: 2i2c-org/frx-challenges This project aims to make it easier for administrators to provide a service that enables users to submit code and data that are evaluated on secure infrastructure with access to private data and resources.

On most research oriented JupyterHub installations, users would like to customize their server (the environment, resources available, etc) after logging in. In Kubernetes based JupyterHub environments, a profile list provides this functionality.

Grafana dashboard showing cloud costs broken down by compute, storage and other components for the Openscapes hub. We are pleased to unveil a new feature to track cloud costs within our Grafana dashboards!

The UToronto hub landing page 2i2c has operated The University of Toronto hub since 2021 and this hub supports over 6000 educators and learners in a day! With a community of this size, file storage can quickly grow out of control and cause issues.

What happened? # A few weeks ago, the JupyterHub team discovered a security vulnerability in the jupyter-server-proxy package that would allow potential unauthenticated access to a JupyterHub via WebSockets, allowing unauthenticated users to run arbitrary code on the JupyterHub.