We’re excited to announce a set of new features and improvements to the new CERN Document Server (CDS), now running on InvenioRDM v12! Our focus has been on making CDS more user-friendly and efficient for everyone.
The long list of all changes is detailed in the full changelog. Below, the main highlights more relevant to the CERN community.
What’s new?
Enhanced Search Accuracy
We’ve improved the search functionality to make finding records easier and more precise. Whether you’re looking for specific datasets or publications, the search engine is now optimized to deliver more accurate results, helping you locate the content you need faster.
Mathematical Formula Rendering
For researchers working with complex formulas, CDS now nicely renders LaTeX formulas within search results and records.
Content Policy and Terms of Use
To ensure transparency and safeguard users, we have added a Content Policy and Terms of Use to the platform. These documents clarify the rules regarding content submission and usage on CDS, helping maintain a safe and collaborative environment.
Introduction of sub-communities
One of the biggest updates is the feature of sub-communities. Communities on CDS can now be nested, meaning a community can have a parent community. This change brings more flexibility in organizing and structuring data, catering to the diverse needs of departments and research groups.
User Interface Tweaks
We’ve implemented a series of UI improvements, including fixing issues with community logos and adding enhanced loading icons during login and logout among other fixes. These small but impactful updates make the interface more user-friendly and visually coherent.
Migration of the 1st collection
Under the hood, we are working hard to migrate the very first collection of documents from the current CDS repository to our new platform. We are now in the process of testing the migration of documents and files, and ensuring the correct redirection of web links.
This is a very important milestone: it will prove that the migration processes that we have put in place are working as expected, and it will unblock the migration of the next collection of documents.
What’s next?
Our team is already working on new features for future releases:
Collections
We are developing a way to categorize records easily within a community (or independently) based on metadata. This allows users to organize and navigate records more intuitively.
Automatic Ingestion of ORCID and ROR Values
To save time and streamline workflows, we are working on automating the ingestion of ORCID and ROR data into the system, ensuring that author and organization identifiers are up-to-date without manual input.
Integration with CERN users database
We are working on making CERN users findable when searching for authors or collaborators during an upload.
Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, feel free to share your feedback with us!
We are happy to share some new updates about the CDS Videos platform. Our latest infrastructure upgrade introduces several improvements to enhance performance, security, and user experience. Here’s a summary of the key changes:
Upgraded search software
We’ve transitioned to OpenSearch, a central IT service that significantly boosts our search functionality and ensures a better integration with IT-provided services, removing maintenance’s redundancy.
Platform and security upgrades
We’ve upgraded our system from CERN CentOS 7 (CC7) to AlmaLinux 9 operating system. This change was part of the CERN campaign to upgrade all systems running on the former software as it is not actively supported anymore. This change ensures our platform’s resiliency and provides a more secure environment for all our users.
Improved upload features
Parallel uploads: We’ve addressed and resolved previous issues with multiple large parallel uploads. Uploading several large files simultaneously is now faster and more reliable.
Upload form improvements
We have made some changes in the upload form based on feedback we gathered from you. We hope they improve how you upload content on our platform.
Keywords: You can now enter keywords separating them with commas. That will allow you to paste e.g. “keyword1, keyword2” and the system will automatically convert them into 2 separate tags for you after pressing ENTER, improving the process of tagging and categorizing videos.
Date: We’ve enhanced the date input functionality to allow you to input dates directly instead of using always the date picker widget. That is useful when you want to input a rather old date.
Contributors:
When you enter a custom contributor name, the system will convert the name automatically to a capitalized version e.g. “doe, joe” will be converted to “Doe, Joe“, ensuring a consistent appearance across the platform.
We’ve added a new contributor role, “Subtitles by” so you can give proper credit to those who provide subtitles for your videos.
These upgrades are part of our continuous efforts to improve the CDS Videos platform. We hope these changes will provide you a better, more efficient experience.
Over the past six months, we’ve been busy making the CERN Library Catalogue even better, and we can’t wait to share all the exciting updates with you.
All these improvements have been designed and implemented in close collaboration with our colleagues from the CERN Library.
News for the patrons
CERN Maps integration
Thanks to newly implemented CERN Maps integration, you can now precisely locate where a book’s shelf is within the library, making it easier than ever to find them:
A big thank you to the CERN Maps team for the successful collaboration, which made it possible.
Self-Checkout
We’re introducing self-checkout! Soon, you will be able to check out books all by yourself without requiring a librarian at the desk, by using the new in-browser barcode scanner from your mobile phone.
Other user interface and user experience improvements:
Books’ subtitles are now visible on the search results page.
The opening hours page now includes a link to Library location on CERN Maps.
Moving on to the other updates…
We have worked extensively on improving the search and content display:
Edition, publication year, and volume are now visible on book titles.
We’ve added a “More on this subject” section to highlight related books.
We have improved search capabilities to provide more accurate results:
Accurate results for searching without accents and special characters for books with accented letters or special characters.
Better search results with less ambiguity.
And guess what? You can now find and access audiobooks and online video courses in the catalogue!
For librarians
Bulk import for new content
Librarians are now able to bulk import audiobooks and online video courses from external providers.
The bulk importer navigation is now improved as well as document matching, which helps to reduce false duplicates and keep the catalogue clean when importing.
Library management
Interlibrary loans are now easily accessible in the back-office. Loan management is now easier, thanks to integration of closure dates (bank holidays, etc.) to all calendars displayed when choosing the start date of a loan. We’ve also improved on several navigation elements, making important metadata mandatory and added more metadata to better describe a book.
Looking Ahead
Our focus has been on making it easier to find and access books and other resources available in the CERN Library Catalogue, by improving how books are managed and displayed, enhancing checkout and search capabilities.
We hope that you will enjoy all these new features!
Today is an exciting day at the CDS website! We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to bring you some exciting improvements to your user experience. As of this moment, you can start enjoying the benefits of these enhancements:
Brand new Web Lectures player: thanks to the fantastic work of our colleagues from the Webcast and Recording service, we’ve said goodbye to the previous Web Lectures player (based on THEOplayer and JW Player) and welcomed a new video player, powered by Paella. This sleek, modern player is designed to make your video-watching experience smoother and more enjoyable than ever before.
Seamless Access: You’ll notice a significant change in how you access the restricted Web Lectures. No more redirections or weird pop-ups asking for credentials—restricted videos now display seamlessly, thanks to the integration with the CERN Single Sign-On (SSO).
Enhanced Download Options: We’ve always offered download options, and now it’s even easier to distinguish between lecture slides and presenter recordings. Also, subtitles are now available for download as well.
Smoothly Embedded Videos: If you embed videos from the CDS platform, you’ll experience a seamless transition to the new video player.
In past days, the CDS website experienced an unprecedented Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server by overwhelming the target with a flood of Internet traffic. You can find here more information.
What happened
On Monday, April 22, 2024, at approximately 11:30 AM, our monitoring systems detected a significant increase in traffic to the website. Analysis of the incoming HTTP requests revealed a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. As a result, the CDS website became inaccessible to most users.
As an initial response, we promptly reached out to the CERN Computer Security Team for assistance. Furthermore, we posted an announcement regarding the incident on the CERN Service Portal Status Board, referencing number OTG0149709. Additionally, we communicated the incident via our official Mattermost channel, accessible to CERN users, and we added an informational banner to the website for those who were able to access it.
First actions
We have quickly realized that mitigating the attack would take longer than anticipated. At 12:30 PM, we made the decision to restrict access to the website solely from within the CERN network. This measure ensured that CERN users could still access the website while allowing us to concentrate on implementing countermeasures.
Around 3:30 PM, it appeared that the attack rate had decreased. In collaboration with CERN Computer Security Team, we made the decision to reopen access to the website from outside the CERN network. However, less than an hour later, the attack resumed, with an even higher volume of traffic. We decided to close access again.
Resolution
Due to the overwhelming majority of incoming requests originating from a specific geographical location, we made the difficult decision to block access to the website from that entire area. Simultaneously, we reinstated access from outside the CERN network. This countermeasure was implemented on Tuesday, April 23, 2024, at approximately 3:30 PM. As an additional security measure, we completely disabled IPv6 connections. All operations have been performed by CERN Computer Security Team in collaboration with us and the Network team.
The restrictions on users accessing CDS from certain locations will remain in place until we confirm that the attack has ceased. We are continuously monitoring incoming traffic in order to lift these restrictions as soon as possible.
The reasons and specifics behind this attack targeting CDS remain unclear. We have provided all available logs and information to the CERN Computer Security Team, who will conduct the necessary investigations and take appropriate actions.
Next steps
As it is the first time that we experience such a large-scale and distributed attack, it’s evident that we were unprepared. However, this experience has provided valuable insights and lessons for both our team, the CERN Computer Security and Network teams. We’re actively leveraging these takeaways to enhance our infrastructure and ensure readiness for any future occurrences.
While the CERN Computer Security and Network teams are currently analyzing logs and enhancing detection and mitigation tools to accelerate response times, our immediate focus will be on improving our alarming systems. Additionally, we are prioritizing enhancements to our DDoS protection mechanisms. Furthermore, efforts are underway to establish a reliable internal infrastructure as a contingency in the event of external compromise, ensuring continued access to the website for CERN users.
More technical details
During the initial stages of the DDoS attack, we observed a traffic volume of roughly 5,000 requests per minute. However, the incoming traffic within the CERN network was constantly increasing (we observed the number of 20,000 requests per minute, and growing UPDATE: we observed the number of 3.5M requests per hour).
While these figures may not seem excessively high, the CDS infrastructure is not designed to handle such volumes, as we aim to avoid over-sizing the infrastructure when unnecessary. By comparison, traffic on CDS typically reaches around 500 requests per minute, with peaks of 1,000 requests per minute.
Despite implementing counter-measures such as blocking numerous IPs or scaling up our infrastructure to accommodate more traffic, the number of requests continued to escalate during the attack. It appeared that the attacker was capable of increasing the size of the attack.
A sophisticated attack
Implementing counter-measures for attacks of this scale is challenging. The attack vector exhibited a high level of sophistication.
Here is an example of a single HTTP request (with the IP address masked):
As you can observe, identifying a consistent pattern to safely and effectively distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic is challenging due to the following reasons:
The URL path and HTTP verb appeared to be entirely random, with most requests resulting in a 404 error.
The User-Agent was generated randomly.
We detected over 46,000 different IPs originating from various locations.
Each IP was responsible for a relatively low number of requests.
It was also unexpected to discover that attempting to block a large number of IPs could put pressure on many software components in the infrastructure.
Conclusion
Access to the website was restored within a few hours, successfully stopping the attack. However, this DDoS attack is still ongoing, and access to CDS from certain locations will remain blocked until it stops.
It is now even clearer to us that defending against such attacks requires a high level of expertise and investment in robust infrastructure and tools.
As service providers, we are grateful for the expertise and competence of the specialized teams at CERN. Their dedication ensures that we can effectively address challenges and maintain the reliability of our services.
In the entire 2023, until October, our team worked in closed collaboration with the Zenodo team to launch the new version, now based on InvenioRDM, the turn-key research data management repository platform.
This is also a fundamental step for the future version of CDS, which is also based on InvenioRDM. Thanks to this new Zenodo launch, InvenioRDM is now a battle-tested platform, and it will receive constant improvements to make sure that it fulfils the needs of researchers worldwide.
We have learned a ton preparing the new version of Zenodo, not only developing features, but also preparing the infrastructure. With all these lessons-learned, the new CDS will be a more reliable and performant platform.
Next steps
We will work until the end of this year 2023 to analyze the features available today in CDS, and identify the ones that are essential to migrate to the new version.
We are working on a detailed migration plan, and we will get in contact with the main communities to better understand their needs and ensure a smooth transition from the current CDS to the new one, in 2024.
We are very excited, and we are looking forward to seeing the new CDS being used at CERN!
Summer has already started 😎 and, in the previous months, we have worked hard to integrate the latest development in the new CDS platform.
The result looks beautiful!
The new CDS platform is the brand-new version of the current CERN institutional repository, a modern and easy-to-use website where CERN users can archive and share their research, multimedia content or departmental documents.
You can now preview and try out the latest features in our test instance https://sandbox-cds-rdm.web.cern.ch (reachable from inside CERN campus). Just to mention a few, we have integrated users and groups CERN databases; newly uploaded publications will now have a DOI out-of-the box, ready to be shared and cited; files are securely stored in EOS file system. And there is much more.
The “Browse” section contains links to collections and categories to the former CDS platform: we will slowly migrate data to this brand-new CDS.
The footer of the new CDS website contains useful links to make sure that you will find the information that you need.
The production instance https://new-cds.cern.ch will be soon start to be used by some selected communities at CERN, and we will gather feedback to continuously improve it and make it as easy as possible to use.
After summer, more features will be coming 🚀: we will make it very easy to restrict and share documents with other users, and we will work on the administration panel to fully manage records and users in the system.
This version is just the base for the future CDS. More features will be needed to support all current use cases. To that end, we will be contacting and working together all main users so that we can define together the plan for completion of this future Institutional Repository.
With the LTS release (v9) and the latest release (v10), InvenioRDM has reached the maturity needed for production-ready digital repository websites. InvenioRDM is a generic data management repository, developed by our team in collaboration with many partners all over the world. Free to use and open-source.
As first milestone, we have created and deployed the new instance of CDS and also migrated a selected set of records, metadata-only. This initial setup will allow us to iterate with the process of data migration, expanding incrementally the number of records and improving the data quality.
In the first quarter of this year, we will continue working on the InvenioRDM product, adding more features and integrating them in the new CDS website.
We will also start an analysis of the feature-set available in the current CDS, but still missing in the new platform: thanks to this, we will be able to come up with a plan for the next steps.
We are very excited to finally see the new CDS taking shape! Stay tuned for future announcements!
In September 2022, we have changed the integration from the old CERN SSO login to the new one. This was not only needed in relation to the upcoming decommissioning of the old SSO, but it also brings more security (enabling for example Two-Factor Authentication), more performance and more login possibilities. The recurrent login issues with external accounts are also solved.
In the coming weeks, we will also work to perform the same migration on CDS Videos.
InvenioRDM v10
We have now released InvenioRDM v10. Why is this important? Well, simply because it will be the base and the core software of the future CDS platform!
InvenioRDM v10 comes with support for custom metadata (necessary to store CERN specific fields, such as report number, experiments, accelerators, etc.), a new administration panel to make it easy to manage the instance and support for the new search engine OpenSearch. The latter will be necessary to comply with the standard CERN IT infrastructure.
In this last part of the year, the team will focus on creating a showcase version of the new CDS website, including a new look and feel and automatic deployments. This demo website will be useful to demonstrate features, test user experience and perform dry-run data migration from the current CDS to the new one in an iterative and progressive manner, to make sure that migrated data is correct.
CERN Library Catalogue
During the summer, we have made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes to the CERN Library Catalogue as well! To mention a few, book covers are now beautifully aligned and styled and the search for periodical and serial volumes now shows search tips.
In the context of InvenioILS, we also made it easier to create your own library catalogue website: with a couple of commands, users can set up a new instance and have a running website in a few minutes!
These first 6 months of the year 2022 have been quite busy. The CDS team focused on the development of InvenioRDM, the future research data management digital repository platform that will be the core of the future CDS version.
At the same time, production services need to be taken care of. While performing maintenance operations, we also worked on bug fixes and some technical features.
Future CDS platform – cds.cern.ch
With a small break of the development activities, we took half a day to discuss and define how we will kick off the new CDS platform: we came up with what we think will be a good strategy, and we hope to have the first dev/test instance by the end of the year, including a small subset of data migrated from the current CDS to the new one.
Even if it will be a long journey, we are very excited to get started!
InvenioRDM v9 and 9.1
The team contributed to the development of the latest 2 releases: InvenioRDM v9.0 and v9.1. These new releases enable curators to create their own communities of documents, to better self-organize content and make it easier for users to submit and find content. Each community is clearly identified, thanks to the new header with the name and the logo.
The way new documents are added to a community is managed via requests: when submitting a new document to a community, a new request is created where the submitted and the community’s curator can have a conversation with commenting. The request can be approved or rejected.
CDS Videos just got faster – videos.cern.ch
We have implemented a new feature in CDS Videos: the post-processing of uploaded videos got 2x faster! This is particularly visible when large video files are uploaded: the first two tasks, the extraction of the metadata, embedded in the video file, and the extraction of the video’s thumbnails now take half of the time.
Maintenance…
Databases for all the services have been upgraded to the latest versions, to ensure safety and security. The transcoding software, used in CDS Videos, have also been upgraded by our colleagues from the Webcast team, so that we can take advantage of the latest fixes and features.
On the 5th of July 2022, CDS suffered some slowness due to a very high amount of traffic, requesting some photos embedded in the CERN Home website. While being slower than normal conditions, the CDS website managed to serve more than a million requests, with a pick of 800 requests/second (thanks to connection queues).
While we are happy to see that our platform was up and running in such unusual conditions, we have identified some improvements, and we are working to change our infrastructure to be more performant when serving files.
What’s next
During summer, many absences are foreseen. The team will continue working on InvenioRDM v10: its features are critical to the future version of CDS. We are also planning to upgrade the web lectures player for an improved user experience when watching recorded talks, seminar or events.
