Back to the Cal Poly Home PageThe New System will be running HP-UX version 10.x. This is HP's variation of the POSIX form of UNIX. HP-UX is built on AT&T System V and BSD 4.3 with System V.4 file structure.
Users wishing to access the system for an interactive session would telnet to the General Session Server (name to be determined). All user interactive activity would take place on this machine. In the future, when loads increase, additional CPUs, memory and/or a second General Session Server could be added.
The users will ultimately have several choices for email with the new cluster. In the beginning, there will be many of the choices we currently have, but with much more power to support them. These choices are
In addition, part of the contract includes HP's OpenMail and CS&T's OpenTime products. These are client-server products which would allow a user to access their mail from remote workstations and from home with an OpenMail client. OpenTime is a calendaring product which provides group calendaring capabilities.
Additional information on Cal Poly's OpenMail/OpenTime project can be found here.
ITS will be doing everything possible to guarantee that all mail sent to your current address will be received by the new system once it has taken over the mail function. Planning of the machine names and email address resolution is still under discussion.
All mail sent to a user's AIX account before mail is moved to the new machines will be transferred at the time of transition. All mail sent to the AIX addresses will be redirected to the new mail machine.
The intent is to maintain all user logins and passwords for the initial phase. With increased security measures in place on the new systems, we may require users to change their passwords more frequently.
The compute server is accessed via the "on" command. To run a command on the Compute Server the user would issue the command in the following fashion:
% on site-name command-name parameters<CR>
where "site-name" is the network node name of the Computer Server machine (yet to be determined) and "command-name" is the desired command to be executed and "parameters" are optional parameters for the specified command.
Access to other systems within the cluster will be limited to systems specifically designated for user processes.
ITS will be reviewing the difference between the systems and will create Faculty/Staff workshops to explain these differences. Since both systems are predominately POSIX style UNIX systems, we should not see too many differences at the user level.
As differences are discovered between the two systems, they will be added to a separate page designed to display those differences between systems.
More than likely, the new system will require changes to the dot files. We will make every effort to keep these changes to a minimum and to identify any problems.
NOTE: The "dot" files are text files in your account that control how the system behaves for your session.
TBD
Yes. The user file systems and the paths to them will change as part of the cluster redesign, but users' accounts and the files they own will be moved to the new system.
TBD
Any program compiled on the old system will need to be recompiled to run on the new system. Shell scripts such as Bourne, Korn, C-shell, T-shell, and Perl should run with minor modifications.
ITS will make every effort to install the majority of the applications software which are available on the old AIX system on the new HP system. Priorities will be based on academic need for fall quarter and anticipated usage.
ITS will be installing a variety of applications programs and utilities on the new systems.
ITS will be installing a variety of applications programs from other Cal Poly systems on the new systems.
HP will be providing a large amount of software and compilers as part of the contract with Cal Poly.
Not to begin with. If there is a compelling academic need to increase quotas we will review the current quota levels and make adjustments if necessary.
Users who have present valid reasons for quota increases will receive them. Users using the system to store non-academic materials will be refused quota increases.
This will be reviewed once the new system is in place. With the advent of OpenMail, this may become a moot point, as OpenMail handles mail in a different fashion using a message-store technology.
User filesystems will be merged into larger filesystems as they are migrated from the AIX machines to the HP File Server. The paths to the new filesystems are available by following this link.
No. This system is entirely academic in nature and its loads will probably always cause the restriction of playing games.
The hardware names of the machine are not important. What is important is the DNS names used by the Service Guard packages. These names of the packages will move with their associated IP address to the fail over machine when their primary system fails. There are several packages that are defined for the cluster at this point and they are:
You will note that there are eight packages being distributed over six machines.
Two of the packages (polysrv1 and polysrv2) will migrate from the File Server hardware to two separate machines in the event of failure. One of the machines which will receive user home file systems only is the Session Server. The other machine which picks up the load will receive a minimal number of user home file systems.
It should be noted that although the NETNews function has a package name, it does not currently failover to another machine. In the future, there may be more resources available to keep this service up in the event of a failure, but under the current configuration it is the least important function and it will not experience any data loss by being down; it will just have more backlog to deal with upon coming back up.
Revised by: George Westlund (gwestlun@calpoly.edu)Back to the Q and A Table of Contents