Help Page for Kober.US computing resources.

What systems are available?

WARNING:  Use of this system is restricted to authorized personnel only.
Activities on this system are monitored, recorded, and subject to audit.
Any unauthorized access or use of this system is prohibited and is
subject to criminal and civil penalties.

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Interactive, Compute and Service Microsystems

host      users   load avg.                uptime      description

honu          3         0.26, 0.18, 0.18   524 day(s)  Solaris 10   2Gb  1x650MHz UltraSPARC IIe+ 64bit 18W
batra         0         0.09, 0.10, 0.11   524 day(s)  Solaris 10  .5Gb  1x500MHz UltraSPARC IIe  64bit 13W
quercus       3         0.00, 0.01, 0.00       7 days  FreeBSD 8.2  6Gb  2x2.6GHz Pentium 5300    64bit 65W
frink         6      40.02, 30.87, 24.86      22 days  CentOS  5.6 56Gb 24x2.4GHz Xeon E5620      64bit 80W
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  batra SMTP Relay count: 0
            motd updated: Wed Feb 22, 2012 @ 17:41:19
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 ___|___  
  -(*)-          Welcome!
  o/ \o   
     

What is honu?

This installation is for general use. It is modeled in the spirit of a university or research community resource.

"UNIX is a general-purpose, multi-user, interactive operating system" D.M. Ritchie and K. Thompson, 'The UNIX Time-Sharing System', C. ACM 17 No. 7 (July 1974), pp365-75.

What is catalina?

It was a used Sun Microsystems Enterprise 250 Server (sun4u) running the Solaris 10 Operating Environment (a mature and popular UNIX release). catalina has two 400-MHz UltraSPARC-II processors each with 2 Mbyte L2 e-cache (SPARC V9 High-performance superscaler RISC Architecture implementation) and 2 Gbytes of main memory. The E250 was EOL'd by Sun August 2003. catalina was placed into service May 2005.

catalina has a Sun DLT7000 and a DDS-3 tape backup drive. Recently, an inexpensive Belkin F5U219v1 USB2.0 PCI card was added to support an external La Cie 320GB 301146U USB 2.0 drive. This drive is using ZFS and performing well.

What is degobah?

degobah was a used Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 20 Workstation (sun4m) running the Solaris 7 Operating Environment (a mature and popular UNIX release). degobah has two 125-MHz HyperSPARC processors each with 512 Kbyte L2 cache (SPARC V8 High-performance superscaler RISC Architecture implementation) and 512 Mbytes of main memory. The SS20 was EOL'd by Sun August 1997.

What is sapa?

sapa is a used Sun Microsystems Ultra 10 Workstation (sun4m) running the Solaris 9 Operating Environment (a mature and popular UNIX release). sapa has a single 440Mhz UltraSPARC-IIi processor with 2 Mbyte L2 cache (SPARC V8 High-performance superscaler RISC Architecture implementation) and 1 Gbytes of main memory. The Ultra 10 was EOL'd by Sun August 2002. sapa was placed into service in September 2002.

How do I use my account on catalina?

Use scp or sftp for encrypted file copy software (e.g. to copy files to & from catalina).

Where do I get these tools?

Windows 32bit

• PuTTY: A Free Win32 Telnet/SSH Client (ssh) [local - 336Kbytes]
• TTSSH: An SSH Extension to Teraterm for Windows (ssh)
• WinSCP freeware client for Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP using SSH (version 1.0) (scp)

• MacSSH (ssh)
• NiftyTelnet SSH (ssh, scp)

How do I check email on catalina?

• Web Browser - https://webmail.kober.us
• Encrypted terminal sessions (shell) - type 'pine' at the prompt.
• IMAP (via SSH tunnel)

What software is available on catalina?

MailMan, the GNU Mailing List Manager, is available to help manage electronic mail discussion lists.

phpScheduleIt is the available resource scheduler.

Available engineering and scientific software for:

• phylogenetic inference, nucleotide/protein sequence alignment and analysis: XSAT, GDE, PAUP*, PHYLIP, mrbayes
• airfoil development: XFOIL

Available programming languages and their respective compilers are:

• C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, Ada (gcc)
• perl (perl)
• java (Sun J2SDK: javac)
• python (python)

Why run Sun Solaris on SPARC?

• It's UNIX.
• The license is included with the hardware.
• Entirely modular binary kernel with dynamically loadable modules.
• Multithreaded kernel and process execution.
• Integrated with hardware development of SPARC processors.
• 64bit kernel and process address space (UltraSPARC).
• Mature symmetric multiprocessing and processor partitioning and binding.
• Fully preemptable kernel and support for multiple schedulers.
• Demand-paged and modular virtual memory system.
• Fully implemented and supported STREAMS driver.
• Fully supported thread libraries (Sun && POSIX).
• Majority of system is documented in man pages.
• Backwards compatability: kernel support for legacy software (e.g. kernel modules) on subsequent releases.
• Sun hardware is reliable, easy to maintain and service, designed to perform and the hardware is affordable and available.

What has been done to improve webmail (Squirrelmail) performance?

• UW imapd
  • Enabled Server-side threading
  • Disabled tcpd for imapd (behind a firewall)
• in.imapproxyd IMAP proxy server
• Enabled PHP zlib.output_compression
• Apache httpd:
  • Using mod_php
  • Using OSSP MM w/Apache 1.3.x
  • KeepAlive On
  • KeepAliveTimeout high
  • MaxKeepAliveRequests high
  • mod_ssl
  • SSLMutex sem
  • SSLSessionCache using dbm
  • SSLSessionCacheTimeout high
  • SSLRandomSeed builtin
• Running on a faster computer (catalina)
• Mail spools and home directories on mirrored disks
• Using -O2 with gcc

Where can I get helpful information for the UNIX operating system?

• The University of Edinburgh UnixHelp for User's is a fine introduction with excellent advanced tips.
• The UNIX Time-Sharing System by D.M. Ritchie and K. Thompson is an original paper describing UNIX for the DEC PDP-11 and Interdata 8/32 computers. Suprisingly (well, maybe not) applicable to modern UNIX distributions.