The current relationship between Sol and Jove is about to change for the better. There are several changes being made this semester that should dramatically improve the way you interact with these systems described below.
The way you go about getting an account on Jove has changed dramatically. This is in part both cause and effect of our new purpose for Jove.(See below.) As of this semester, those persons who are affiliated with UNT in such a way as to have been issued a UNT ID card are eligible for accounts on Jove.
To get one, all you have to do is sit down at a terminal, connect to UNT's Gopher or WWW server, find the Computing Center section on the hosts managed by Academic Computing Services and you will find a form there that you can fill out and file electronically to request an account. No more running around trying to get various departmental authorities to sign your form and provide budget codes! No approval, other than your own, is required to acquire an account! Once you file your request, your account will be ready in less than 2 working days. In most cases, you will be able to pick up your account information in ISB 119 within an hour or two. Eventually, this will be almost immediate. In any case you will still be required to appear in person with a valid picture ID in ISB 119 to get your account information slip which will have your User-ID and password on it.
As of this semester, Jove has been given a new purpose to host
accounts for a new Student E-Mail System. To facilitate this, we have
tried to make getting an account as easy as possible. (See above.) Jove
was originally constructed from a windfall of leftover parts from a Sol
upgrade and a very few new components (primarily the chassis). As such,
Jove had very little official direction. Amos Gouaux, Jove's System
Administrator, has been instrumental in providing a direction for the
growth of Jove and the types and quality of software it supports. With
the call for a system to provide a central resource for student E-Mail
that can be accessed both from the local campus backbone as well as over
UNT's dialup lines and via the Internet, the answer turned out to be
Hey, we've already got that on Jove! All we have to do is expand it. A
new system has been ordered to replace the current Solbourne 5E/702 and
is expected to arrive in Sept.-Oct. We will start out with a Sun
SPARCserver 1000 with 2 50MHz SuperSPARC CPU's and 128MB RAM, and a very
large disk array (possibly 2 32GB RAID Arrays) for mail spooling and
home directories. We expect to be able to provide an average of 1MB of
disk storage and 1MB of E-Mail spool area per user for a total of about
32,000 users when we reach capacity. We hope to have it on-line and
ready to support the E-Mail software within a few weeks and ready to
replace the current 5E/702 completely by Thanksgiving or Christmas. We
also plan to expand it with 2 more CPUs and 128MB RAM during this fiscal
year. Before you ask, the old system is slated to provide a more
powerful platform for many of our other campus services such as our
Gopher and WWW servers, USENet News server, E-Mail router, etc. which
are currently running on desktop class systems which are running out of
steam.
As we transition account holders from the VAX to Jove and Sol and
increase Jove's ability to handle more introductory users, we plan to
also move those persons using Sol as an Internet home base over to Jove.
E-Mail forwarding will be provided so that E-Mail to Sol will be
forwarded to Jove automagically. The only difference that users will
likely notice is that they will be connecting to Jove instead of Sol
on a menu somewhere and that the name of their home directory has
changed. Other than those two highly cosmetic differences everything
will be identical. Keep an eye on the messages presented when you log in
for details of exactly when this transition will occur.
In the past, we have restricted accounts to one on either Sol or
Jove, but not both in 99% of the cases. This is about to change. All Sol
account holders will be automatically given Jove accounts. During this
semester, accounts will be gradually moved from Sol to Jove for those
people not needing access to specific software available only on Sol.
For those persons needing access to those software packages, their home
base will be moved to Jove, but access and file storage space local to
Sol will be retained.
In the future, getting a Sol account will be just like getting a
Jove account with the exception that the request must be approved by the
Computing Center and the primary basis for granting or denying access
will be the purpose you state in your application for access. For
example, if you are doing some sort of project where you need access to
a high-speed, high-capacity statistics program you will probably want to
use the SAS software package on Sol. You would state this in your
request and we would base our decision on that statement. As always,
there are exceptions to every rule and if you feel you have been denied
access unjustly, a personal appearance or phone call to the Computing
Center is certain to clear up any misunderstanding on our part.
As in the past, please keep in mind that Jove and Sol are organized
in such a way that if you have an account with access to both systems,
it is just exactly that. A single account with access to both systems.
This means that your home directory is the exact same piece of disk
drive on Jove regardless of the system to which you are logged in. If
you have access to Sol as well as Jove, you will also be given an area
local to Sol in which to store your data and programs to be used on Sol.
Even if Jove is down, although you will not have access to your home
directory, you will be able to log in and access this other home and
do work. You will receive all E-mail on Jove regardless of the system to
which it was addressed. You will not be notified of new E-mail that
arrives on Jove if you are only logged in to Sol, thus you should log in
to Jove and do your general Internet work from there and just use Sol to
do those things that can only be done there. As mentioned above, all
this will happen gradually, and you will be notified in advance before
any significant changes are made to your accounts.
If you have problems or questions about this server, please contact me as soon as possible. You can send mail to the following address:
WWW@unt.edu