UNIX Systems Upgrade News

By the time you read this, the Sol migration should be complete or very nearly so. Here's a rundown of what's been happening in the UNIX area lately and some plans for the future.

Sol was traded in for a Sun Ultra Enterprise 5000 system with 4 167MHz UltraSPARC CPUs, 1024MB of Error Correcting Memory, and over 40960MB (40GB) of disk storage of which 30GB is dedicated to user space and the rest is used for system software, work areas, virtual memory space, system logging, etc. This system is intended to return to its original purpose of supporting computational research with a relatively small amount of support for classroom activities. We have been allowed by Sun to keep our old Sol for a time in order to ease the transition and have a time to compare systems.

As a means to this end, our new policy is that all non-research/classroom activities be done on Sol's sister system, Jove. These activities include, but are not limited to, reading/sending E-Mail, reading/posting USENET News articles, etc. In order to reach this goal, all customers who previously had their home directories on Sol, have been transitioned to Jove and all mail previously delivered to Sol now will arrive on Jove. For those of you using Simeon to read your E-Mail, this change should be somewhat transparent as we will automatically update your Simeon IMSP options to reflect your new E-Mail home.

Also, to further ease the transition to using Jove as your "home base," we are in the process of greatly increasing the space available on Jove for home directories and new E-Mail. The current disk quota for all Jove users is 4MB with an extra 1MB "overdraft." This figure is 8 times that which was in place back in 1992. Now although 4/5MB sounds like very little, when you multiply it out by the almost 19,000 users currently on Jove, that comes to 95,000MB of disk space or roughly 93GB, what some people might call 97 billion words. That's a lot of disk storage.

Jove's disk array that is currently used for home directory storage, and nothing else, holds 30 2GB disks which when formatted and a few are held back as "hot spares" yields roughly 38GB worth of usable disk space. As you can see, we, much like the airlines, are practicing a technique called planned overbooking in which we gamble that a significant portion of our customers will never come close to using the amount of disk we will allow and thus, the space doesn't run out. In practice, we are currently seeing an average usage of less than 1/2 MB per account which just happens to be the amount of space we used to "book" for each user back in 1992.

For those of you who are already using both Sol and Jove, the new Sol's operating system is identical to Jove's. If you are only familiar with Sol, using the new Sol will be very similar, but there are some subtle changes in the way the system operates. For example, arguments to some familiar commands like ls and ps have changed in some cases.

Also new to those of you who have only used one of our sister systems is the way that your home directory follows you around from system to system. Under the new configuration, everyone's home directory will be on Jove. That means that the disk is physically attached to Jove. Even so, when you log in to Sol, you see the same files and directories in your home directory there. This is because Sol has access to your Jove directories across the network in much the same way as you can access files on a NetWare server from a networked PC or Macintosh. This means that any changes you make to your home directory on Jove apply on Sol as well and vice versa.

This feature that generally makes your life much easier but does have one drawback. That is, when Jove is down you can still log in to Sol, but none of your personal file space will be available.

About now you might be wondering just what impact having a Jove home directory might have on any disk intensive programs you may be running on Sol. The answer is, "Very little." The reason for this is that there is also a place on Sol that is physically attached disk that you get access to for your personal work space. This directory is /projects/sol/<>, where you replace "<>" with yourlogin ID. For the sake of utility, it is accessible to Jove via the network just as your home directory on Jove is accessible to Sol.

The current default amount of local disk storage allowed to each Sol user in /project/sol is 10/20MB and those who need more space than that for files storage (other than temporary files which have a special home) may make a request for additional disk quota by sending E-Mail to the operator account. The guidelines for doing this are also available within the on-line help system mentioned earlier.

Batch queuing is a new feature that should be up and running on Sol and possibly other systems around the campus soon. It will allow researchers to submit a series of jobs all at one time and not have to worry about getting reproving letters from the system operators.

The various batch queues will be defined in such a way that policies regarding the number of different sorts of jobs that you are allowed to run at one time will be automatically enforced and you need not worry to much over remembering them. You will have to remember which queues to use for what kind of job, but we hope that that will prove an easier task and that should you have any questions, merely entering the help command at the system command prompt will bring you to the information easily.

Sol is slated for an upgrade to 6 250MHz CPUs, an additional 100-150GB of disk storage (for online storage of large research data sets purchased from outside sources), and a possible 50% increase in system memory. Some of the additional software purchase/installs still on Sol's "To-Do" list are: Maple, MatLab, and NAG.

For a complete list of what's on Sol and what's coming and for other relevant information regarding the UNIX systems and support maintained by Academic Computing Services' UNIX Support Services group, see our homepage at http://www.unt.edu/ACSUNIX/.

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