> What are the other machines that progsoc have and what are they
> supposed to be used for or who are they to be used by? These
> questions may have been answered in a message I missed or deleted by
> accident but I can not remember anything about them.
Nope. My fault. I have been meaning to document the proposed architecture
for a number of weeks, but haven't got around to it. (Boo, hiss.)
The thrust of it is this.
If we are to run multiple machines comfortably, we need a couple of shared
resources.
- A /usr/local for all to use. (/usr/local contains local software packages,
e.g. compilers, mail program, news readers, etc)
- A NIS database (or similar) for storing usernames, passwords, home
directories, perhaps mailbox locations, etc
- User home diretcories. (Shared so users can login to different machines on
the network and still have access to their files.)
Currently ProgSoc's collection of machines includes 3 * Sun3 and 4 * Sun4.
The architecture that we are moving towards is as follows. (Note that
several of the details are subject to continual revision...)
Baalzebub (Sun3 - one of our smallest machines)
---------
DNS server
NIS server (user names, passwords, list of where home directories
and mailboxes are, etc)
Orgo (Our slowest Sun4)
----
/usr/local
Web server
FTP server
Ftoomsh (A Sun4 - our fastest machine)
-------
Mail server (perhaps?)
User home directories for approx 1/2 members
Mail spool for approx 1/2 members
Yeenoghu (A Sun4 - our second fastest machine)
--------
User home directories for approx 1/2 members
Mail spool for approx 1/2 members
Effectively, we are splitting ftoomsh's load across two machines, and making
the changes required to cope with multiple machines. The changes include
setting up NIS, so that user accounts are available to all machines on the
network rather than being machine specific, and cleaning up /usr/local so
that it can be mounted read only (and thus shared by multiple machines). To
date, various log files, data files and config files have been stored with
packages in /usr/local, which makes a shared /usr/local effectively impossible.
Once these changes are effected, we will be in a position to far more easily
bring additional machines online and expect users to just be able to login
and have their username and password recognised, their home directory
mounted, etc. At this point, we'll consider in greater depth the
consequences of moving Muds and the like to their own machine, instead of
competing for resources with shell users.
One day soon I'll document this more thoroughly and post it somewhere.
- Raz