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Web Analyst
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Position Reference HQ0104
Position Title Web Analyst
Closing Date December 16, 2008

Preamble

Contractor’s Hours and Duration

The work outlined is anticipated to begin December 8, 2008 and end February 28, 2009. California Secretary of State (SOS) and Contractor will agree upon the days and hours to be worked. All work to be performed on-site, unless the SOS Project Manager has given prior approval.

Experience

Contractor’s Skills Required

The contractor must have at least 5 years expertise in website systems, network design, information security, the Internet, and related environments and technologies, and with the specific systems and technologies in use at the SOS, to successfully complete the engagement.

Scope of Work Summary

Purpose

The purpose of requirement is to acquire specialized consulting services to review the Secretary of State’s design, implementation, and operation for the November 4, 2008 election, of the Secretary of State (SOS) elections results and related websites. This review shall result in a written report that identifies weaknesses or problems with the website systems and network, and makes recommendations to improve their performance, reliability and maintainability.

 

Contractor’s Responsibilities

The contractor must possess the appropriate skills and experiences to:

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Review the design, configuration and operation of all systems and network components involved in reporting elections results.

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Review logs, traces and other similar material regarding those systems and network components that were recorded during the November 4, 2008 Presidential Election.

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Consider past performance and future trends for election night reporting and Internet client behavior.

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Develop and support findings of fact regarding the performance and operation of the website and networks on November 4 and 5.

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Identify potential problems or issues that may occur in future elections.

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Develop specific recommendations for improving the website systems and networks for future elections. Include consideration for the cost-effectiveness, difficulty and potential risks associated with implementing and with disregarding those recommendations.

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Deliverable 1 - Provide a written report of all findings and recommendations, submitted first as draft and then finalized after SOS review and comment.

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Deliverable 2 - Provide a presentation of the findings and recommendations to SOS senior management.

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Deliverable 3 - Provide a technical presentation of the findings and recommendations to SOS information technology management and staff.

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Consultant will be required to complete this effort within 30 calendar days of contract award.

 

SOS Elections Results Website Technical environment:

The network infrastructure supporting the election night equipment is composed of two DS3 Internet connections provisioned through separate carriers. These two connections path through a Cisco 535 PIX and then through the internal SOS 100MB switched network to a pair of F5 6400 local traffic managers in a failover configuration. The F5 then services requests and load balances them between 4 Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers running the Red Hat ES 5 (Kernel Version 2.6.18-53.1.14.el5PAE) and Apache 2.2.3 web server.

Data feeds are produced in two forms ASCII and XML. The ASCII feed is generated from the database application and pushed to the middle tier servers running Windows 2008. The XML Generator, running on the middle tier servers imports the ASCII feed into a Microsoft SQL 2005 database to create the EML-compliant election result XML that feeds media.

The static content for the Election Results website is generated by parsing the ASCII feed through Perl 5.8.8 code and then the static pages, along with the ASCII feed and XML are pushed to the Apache 2.2.3 web servers.

 

Logs preserved from the November 4, 2008 Presidential Election:

 

Network Logs:

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Orion historical data - includes all network devices in path to election servers, SNMP data can be extracted or simply viewed through browser.

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Syslog - Stored on Orion, includes sources: Internet routers and Pix firewall

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Several packet captures were taken at different times during the night. Source was on the interface headed to the AT&T router, which is the HSRP primary.

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Screen shots were taken of the BigIP web interface for election night and the following morning.

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Snort database - IDS security alerts, web based browsing

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Ntop - traffic monitoring tool

 

Apache access logs including:

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Remote host (IP)

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Date and time of the request

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The request (which page)

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The status (200 = successful, 404 = page not found)

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The number of bytes there were sent in the server’s response

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Referrer - The url of the page that linked to the requested document

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User-Agent - name of browser or other client software making the request

 

Apache error logs including:

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Date and time of the request

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Severity of the error reported

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IP address of the client that generated the error

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The error message

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File system path (instead of web path) of the requested document

 

Tru64 and RedHat Linux Syslogs

 

Windows Server logs

 

Nagios logs containing:

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Julian date/time stamp

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Host event (what type of event in nagios)

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Message from host

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Message from nagios

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Detailed nagios plug-in data

 

 

Contact our corporate office today.

 

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