The project was started as a bold undertaking meant to educate the the future generations of sysadmins and general user population. I've stored and formated answers given by our team to questions sent to our consulting alias help@cis.ksu.edu But it did not seem to serve its purpose. The project was abandoned and lays rusting like the Appolo launchpad.
I just piped messages to a PERL script that HTML formated them and stored by topics specified
All the the data that is provided by our alumni is stored in a plain file. One can fill out an HTML form that invokes a CGI PERL script that updates the file. Folks liked the thing. I even got a request for the script from the Internet. The Alumni page had an offspring recently: Summer on Campus Registration Database.
Our multimedia research team asked me to configure a network of Sun SPARC 5s into several subnets with multicasting (and normal) routing between them. After I've done that they moved the network to some location in upstate New-York where they asked me to reconfigure it several times. I had to strain my touch real hard to be able to reach that far. Here is one of the configurations of the network, courtesy of Ken Gould.
There are about 15 NCD Xterminals and just as many SUN SPARC ELC Workstations at our department. ELCs lack harddrives and are quite slow. So Doug Chapman installed Xkernel and turned then into Xterminals. I've configured our newly arrived Ultra SPARC Nunk to be boot/file/font server for all the tubes, corrected their configuration files, hacked XDM and did all other wizardy and black magic to make them work.
The legendary Greg Lange set up our printer accounting database as an impossible combination of C/Ingres' embedded SQL/(tainted)PERL and Shells. I've corrected, upgraded and expanded what he has done. Here is a little shell script that queries the database to see how many pages I've printed on our laser printers. I've also created a bunch of Databases That Store Information about Everything in Ingres for our front office and wrote a bunch of reports for them.
| Pawel and I configured our hot/fast E4000(ain't she cute? :-) to be one of our major fileservers. We did not get a RAID to go with E4000 but we bought a bunch of cheap disks and "manually" (using SunSoft's DiskSuite) striped and mirrored them to contain our staff and faculty home directories. Recently Helios got upgraded to 10 UltraSPARC2 processors. Yehhha whata ride!! |
I did most of the stuff and graphics for our department's web-page . I used Corel's PhotoPaint to do the graphics. Don't think that if it looks smooth and airy it was also easy to make. Graphics is a stinking timesink. The picture/caption on the page is changed with every reqest (following the original idea of Dave Schmidt) using server side include (SSI) capabilities of NCSA webserver that we run.
Another recent addition: Computer Systems page.
I configured our WindowsNT 4.0 server running as a PDC for the department's Windows NT/95 network. The machine runs a DHCP server for WinNT/95s at our department, DNS with WINS lookup and maintains account information for the network. Roaming profiles are also stored there. Two of our Solaris boxes run Samba and export filesystems and printers for the NT/95 network.
With our volatile user population and NTs GUI oriented account maintenance system some kind of account automation was needed if we ever wanted to go home :-) Thankfully, WindowsNT 4.0 Resource Pack included a usable Remote Shell implementation and net command allowed command line account creation/password entrance. Besides, our Users are not very disciplined in maintaining their so it would be nice to get something to weed out bad passwords.
Larry Wall's PERL password program was found on the Net. It mutated on the Net into something called anlpasswd It was rather raw so I used just pieces of it dealing with security checks. So the resulting program checks password for correctness, updates our Samba password files and then updates account information on PDC. I released to script to the Net. Here is the page that introduces it.
Printer accounting and security in academic environment is a thorny issue. I gave up on standard Solaris SystemV-ish spooling system and installed a free BSD-like LPRng. Inspite of (maybe even due to) profuse documentation it was somewhat a headache to install. Yet finally it was conquered, tamed and put to work. The printers are set up on a separate subnet with a multihomed printhost not routing to it to make our printers Totally Secure(tm)
A habitual lack of diskspace has finally forced us to get a normal RAID.
It is Eurologic's Voyager 3000 model.
It is made in Irelad and speaks with a slight Irish accent. As of now it has
C
6 9G 10K rpm drives and runs RAID 5. It is connected to Rigel (Untra Enterprise 1
box) via differentail ultra-SCSI bus. Rigel houses home and applications filesystems
and talks to the network via Sun's quad-100base T network card.