This page is
continually under construction, and
provides various bits of information for new and old members of CAIA. Please follow the links on the right for more information
Primary file store and compute hosts
Our web server and ssh gateway to the outside Internet is caia.swin.edu.au, a
FreeBSD 'jail' host.
www.caia.swin.edu.au and caia.caia.swin.edu.au
are aliases for caia.swin.edu.au
Our internal file server and compute server is mordor.caia.swin.edu.au.
All user accounts are on this machine. Access to mordor is either via ssh login or
WinNT file shares.
SAMBA support
Within CAIA we use SAMBA to export mordor.caia.swin.edu.au home directories as Windows file shares
You'll need to log into mordor (as a unix user, using ssh from another unix box or, e.g., PuTTY from a
Windows box) and run smbpasswd in order to initially setup your
Windows file sharing password before accessing mordor as a Windows file server. The workgroup will show up as CAIA, and mordor.caia.swin.edu.au
will be (naturally) "mordor"
Your mordor home directory is shared as: \\mordor\<username>
(where <username> is your unix login)
File backup strategy
Incremental backups of all user accounts on mordor occur once an hour during the day. Backups go to two separate machines running FreeBSD 8.x,
eight x 2TByte drives in a RAID-Z2 configuration (two drives may fail without loss of data)
While logged into mordor itself, you can find the most recent version of your home directory at:
/backups_bydate/mordor/home/<username>
Every hour a local snapshot is taken on the backup servers, and kept under:
/backups_bydate/mordor/.zfs/snapshot/<date_time>/home/<username>
where "<date_time>" is in the form YYMMDD_HHMM (year, month, day, hour and minute of the desired snapshot -- e.g. the 8pm
snapshot of March 8th 2011 would be 110308_2000)
After ~48hrs the hourly snapshots are deleted, but we keep midnight snapshots for two weeks. After two weeks we delete the midnight
snapshots except those occurring on day 7, 14, 21, or 28 of the month. We delete all snapshots that are over ten weeks old. To some
degree these time boundaries are arbitrary -- the main goal is to keep hourly snapshots for a smallish period of time (allowing people
to recover from accidental deletion during a work day) while not keeping too many copies of older snapshots
/backups_bydate/mordor on mordor is an NFS-mount to the
remote machine on which these backups physically reside. This allows users on mordor to have direct access to their backups without
manual intervention by system administrators
(See CAIA Technical Report 020927A for a discussion of the previous scheme
CAIA used between 2002 and 2010)
Setting up a CV on caia
On the public website our CVs are located at http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/<username>
You set up your CV page by creating a ~/public_html/cv directory on
mordor, and creating inside this directory an index.html file. The contents of each user's ~/public_html/cv
directory on mordor are copied over to caia's http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/
every 30 minutes (on the hour and half hour)
Please inform me the first time you create your ~/public_html/cv
directory on mordor so I can ensure your account is being updated properly. After that, you can make changes anytime you like
A sample index.html can be retrieved from here
that contains the necessary header, side-bar and footer inclusions
Network bootable tools
Many types of motherboards support 'network boot' (or 'pxeboot') capabilities. On the CAIA network a machine using
pxeboot will receive an IP address from our local DHCP server, and then be directed to load and launch
gpxelinux.0 from
pxeboot.caia.swin.edu.au
The pxeboot'ing machine will then be offered a collection of basic tools via a simple on-screen menu. As of November
2011 these tools include memtest86+, clonezilla, DBAN (BootAndNuke) and network bootable versions of FreeBSD 8. (If you
are inside our intranet, poke around here to see what's
on offer.)
This service is intended for development or experimental purposes only -- once your machine is functioning
correctly, please switch to using a static IP address as assigned by the Centre Director.
Installing FreeBSD
FreeBSD sees frequent use in our lab environment. It is a free, complete, and
open-source version of Unix. FreeBSD provides a flexible and proven platform for prototyping advanced networking
protocols and services. FreeBSD also includes Linux-binary compatibility libraries, so many user-space applications
compiled for Linux will run with minimal tweaking. Perhaps most importantly for budding entrepreneurs, FreeBSD source is
released under the "BSD" license. This allows derivative works to be commercialised (without releasing the source
modifications) or released openly as the authors (you) see fit
Become familiar with the installation instructions from chapter
2 of the online FreeBSD documentation. Pay special attention to instructions for creating an installation CD
or DVD from a binary CD or DVD image file
ISO images for various FreeBSD releases (required to burn your own installer CD or DVD) are available via http at
http://archive.caia.swin.edu.au/isos/freebsd
Note: The NFS server on archive.caia.swin.edu.au will only serve requests that come from the following
Internet networks 136.186.228/24, 136.186.229/24 and 136.186.230/24. HTTP access to the ISOs and CDROMs is limited
to 136.186.228/24 and 136.186.229/24
After booting from an installer CD or DVD you may chose to continue the installation direct from the local CD or
DVD, or pull the required content over the network (if the CD drive noise annoys you)
The local NFS mount location is archive.caia.swin.edu.au:/cdroms/freebsd/XX
where XX represents the desired distribution. For example, archive.caia.swin.edu.au:/cdroms/freebsd/FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-i386-dvd1
would be the path to the i386 version of FreeBSD 8.1 installer DVD, etc. See http://archive.caia.swin.edu.au/cdroms/freebsd
for other locally available releases
Once you're up and running the primary installation of FreeBSD you can NFS-mount other disks with:
/sbin/mount archive.caia.swin.edu.au:/cdroms/freebsd/XX
<your_local_mount_point2>
A selection of pre-compiled FreeBSD packages can be found under <your_local_mount_point>/packages
and installed with pkg_add <package.tgz>, or by running /stand/sysinstall
configPackages and specifying the NFS mount location of the disk from which you want to grab and install
packages
Local FreeBSD repositories
In addition to the FreeBSD ISOs, we host a read-only mirror of the FreeBSD project's SVN (subversion) source code
and Ports collection repositories. This allows much faster svn checkouts and updates for local projects
The source repositories can be found at https://svn.caia.swin.edu.au/os/freebsd_src/
The Ports repository can be found at: https://svn.caia.swin.edu.au/os/freebsd_ports/
Installing PCBSD
PCBSD is a complete desktop OS based on FreeBSD, offering support for KDE,
GNOME, LXDE and a variety of other desktop managers. It sees moderate use in the lab as an alternative desktop environment
to Windows or Linux
ISO images (required to burn your own installer CD or DVD), USB images and (in some cases) pre-built VirtualBox images
are available locally at http://archive.caia.swin.edu.au/isos/pcbsd
Note1: The NFS server on archive.caia.swin.edu.au will only serve requests that come from the following
Internet networks 136.186.228/24, 136.186.229/24 and 136.186.230/24. HTTP access to the ISOs and CDROMs is limited to
136.186.228/24 and 136.186.229/24
Note2: PCBSD 9.1 is the last release that supports both i386 and amd64 architectures. From PCBSD 9.2
onwards only amd64 (x64) architectures will be supported
Printing to the CAIA Print Server
CAIA no longer maintains a centralised printserver, the server located at
http://printserver.caia.swin.edu.au:631/ currently only supports the
CAIA Lab Printer and will at some stage be decommissioned
*NIX Users wishing to print to either the CAIA Lab Printer or the Xerox Printer in EN603 should follow the instructions
at the *NIX Printing FAQ
Windows users should:
- Xerox Printer in EN603 - Search for the network printer
called Staff Printer and install it. Instructions on releasing your print job using your staff/student card can be
found here
- CAIA Lab Printer - Install a local printer and choose to
create a new Standard TCP/IP Port. Enter an IP Address of 136.186.229.41 and create a port name. When selecting
a port type, choose Hewlett Packard Jet Direct. Finally you need to install the correct driver for a HP 2055dn
Laser Printer
Secure access to lab network
Secure access to the lab network is provided through a secure shell (ssh) service on caia.swin.edu.au - contact
Grenville for an account. Ssh clients are available from
OpenSSH.org, and are included in current FreeBSD and Linux distributions. You should
not need to manually install ssh unless you're running a Windows platform
Ssh is preferred for all situations where you might have used telnet in the past, inside or outside the CAIA network.
Scp (rcp over ssh) is the preferred method for file transfers inside and outside the CAIA network (caia.swin.edu.au and
mordor.caia.swin.edu.au do not support any telnet, rsh, rcp, etc...)
X11 under Windows (Cygwin/X)
The open source (and free) implementation of X11 under Cygwin allows X11
clients on other machines in CAIA to be accessed from your Windows desktop. We do not have local copies here, but the
network-based installation runs quite smoothly. Go to the Cygwin/X page and click
on the "Install now" link
Installing VNC
VNC (Virtual Network Computing [note: wikipedia link -- may not
always be trustworthy]) allows you to remotely access a Windows desktop as a window on a local X11 server, or access
an remote X11 desktop through a window on a local Windows machine. VNC was developed by AT&T Labs (Cambridge, UK)
[shut down as of April 2002, archived here and
commercialised here]
There are a number of VNC server and client applications available for most operating systems. Check out:
ssvnc,
TightVNC, UltraVNC or
RealVNC (free edition)
Accessing Website Statistics
Comprehensive usage statistics of this website are available to those inside CAIA. AWstats web based statistics for
www.caia.swin.edu.au can be accessed here
(Note: Statistics will not be accessable if you are using the Swinburne proxy)
