This page is
continually under construction, and
provides various bits of information for new and old members of CAIA.
Primary file store and compute
hosts
Our web server and ssh gateway to the outside Internet is caia.swin.edu.au, a
FreeBSD 5.3 '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, a 2.66Ghz P4 running FreeBSD 4.9
with 2GB RAM and dual 250GB drives in a RAID 1 (mirrored)
configuration. All user accounts are on this machine. Access to mordor
is either via ssh login
or WinNT
file shares.
SAMBA support for WinNT file sharing
Swinburne ITS does not support
WinNT file sharing across their switched-ethernet/VLAN domains
(officially we use Novell Netware). However, within CAIA we use SAMBA to export mordor.caia.swin.edu.au home directories as WinNT 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. One set of
backups goes to a separate machine in the same lab, another set of
backups goes to a dedicated backup file server in a different building.
Both backup servers run FreeBSD.
There are three levels of
incremental backups - hourly, daily, and weekly. Users ssh'd into mordor can
directly access past versions of their /home/<user>
directory at /backups/mordor/XXX/home/<user> where XXX is:
- system.N [N = 0, 1, .... 6 for the past
7 hours of incremental backups done at 45 minutes past the hour. N=0 is
the most recent]
- system.day.N [N = 0, 1, .... 6 for the past
7 days of incremental backups, done at 3:15am each day]
- system.week.N [N = 0, 1, .... 6 for the past 7
weeks of incremental backups, each done at 3:30am Saturday]
Hourly backups are at 45 minutes past the hour between 10:45am and
1:45am. The daily backup is a snapshot of system.1 as of 3:15am (i.e.
the user's home directories as of 12:15am). The weekly backup is a
snapshot of system.1 as of 3:30am on Saturday morning.
/backups/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 also, CAIA Technical Report
020927A.)
 |
Setting
up a CV on caia
On the public website our CVs are expected to be at
http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/<username>
To achieve this, create a ~/public_html/cv directory on mordor, and
inside this directory there should be (at minimum) an index.html file.
The contents of each user's ~/public_html/cv directory are copied over
to caia's http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/ every 30 minutes (on the hour and
half hour).
Creating your public CV is as simple as writing an index.html, placing
it into your ~/public_html/cv directory on mordor, and waiting.
Install FreeBSD
FreeBSD is supported 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. In addition, FreeBSD's
Linux-binary compatibility means most user-space applications compiled
for Linux will run out of the box. And perhaps most importantly for
budding entrepreneurs, FreeBSD source is released under the "BSD"
license. Unlike GPL, the BSD license allows derivative works to be
commercialised (without releasing the source modifications) or released
openly as the authors see fit.
Installation
from floppies and NFS
FreeBSD
is available for installation over the local network. You can see which
releases of FreeBSD are available under http://archive.caia.swin.edu.au/cdroms
(look for folders starting with 'freebsd')
- Become familiar with the installation
instructions from chapter
2 of the online FreeBSD documentation. Pay special attention to
instructions for creating two boot floppies and subsequently installing
over NFS.
- Create two boot floppies (see chapter
2.2.6 of the online docs), and boot the target machine (first
the KERN floppy then MFSROOT floppy)
- When prompted, the NFS mount location is archive.caia.swin.edu.au:/cdroms/freebsdXX
(or 136.186.229.34:/cdroms/freebsdXX if
you have DNS problems), where XX represents the desired distribution
("410" for FreeBSD 4.10, "53" for FreeBSD 5.3, etc)
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/freebsdYY
<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.
The
original ISO images for various FreeBSD releases (useful if you wish to burn your own installer
CD) are also available via http:
[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.]
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/XFree86)
The open source (and free) implementation of XFree86 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/XFree86 page and click
on the "Install now" link.
Installing VNC
VNC (Virtual Network Computing [note: wikipedia link may not always be trustworth])
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 online and in
the FreeBSD Packages and Ports collections. Check out:
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).
