CUNIX Hosts
Hardware
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Operating Systems
The cunix cluster has been running SunOS since the days when we had
three Sun 4/280 machines -- as far back as 1988 (the late 1800s in
computer years). SunOS 4.* is a Berkeley based (UCB) version of Unix,
as opposed to the System V (SysV) based SunOS 5.*, more commonly known
as Solaris 2.*. The differences between Berkeley and SysV Unix are
many. The larger differences are in the way the machines are managed,
which is simply a matter of AcIS staff learning new commands and
configurations. The smaller differences are more annoying little
variances in everyday commands -- like "du" showing file sizes in
blocks versus kilobytes and whether "ls -l" shows the group by default.
With the large number of users on the timeshares, we are hesitant to
inflict these changes on all of them at once. Thus, the timeshare
hosts are still running SunOS version 4.1.3_u1. However, the backend
hosts are free from this restriction, and many of them benefit from
some of the more modern features of Solaris 2.5. In particular, file
servers running Solaris are much more efficient than those running
SunOS. Solaris also allows us to use the latest peripherals on our
backend hosts, like the Sparc Storage Arrays (RAID disk systems).
However, the timeshare pool has grown somewhat unwieldy at twelve
Sun Sparc20s, so in order to benefit from Sun's newer hardware (which
only runs Solaris) we hope to convert the timeshare hosts to Solaris
sometime in 1997.
Besides the timeshares, the only systems still running SunOS are the
CPU servers (for transparency), the kerberos hosts (because they are
stable), one DNS name server, and the ID system host (due to the large
body of software that would need to be ported).
The Names
The origin and details of the hello names are available here.
Availability
As the number of machines increases, the likelihood that every single
one will be available at any given time goes down. For example,
during the summer of 1996, ahnnyong and kiaora were taken out of
service to allow more flexibility for the usual summer upgrades and
reconfigurations. The cluster system allows for this type of change
to occur with little loss of service. Additionally, if any single
host is down, users can generally still log in and do all other
functions. With the news server down, users can still read mail.
With the mail server down, users can still send mail, read old mail,
and read news. Even with one fileserver down, which causes half the users to
be without their home directories, those users can still send mail and
read news, though without optimal personal configurations. And if one
timeshare machine is down, it is almost imperceptible.
Systems Group
The central UNIX machines are kept running (smoothly) by the AcIS Systems Group.