New Blade Servers

The consolidation of the Engineering network with the campus network is scheduled for July. With the assistance of Kent and Sheila, Technical Support has identified 46 servers that comprise the existing Engineering network. Two of these servers will be returned to IBM following commencement. The remaining 44 servers are at end of life and will be recycled (some earlier than others…e.g., the four servers that comprise the S drive). In most cases, the functionality of these servers will be provided via the campus network as we will no longer duplicate network resources (e.g., firewall, DSN, DHCP, SMTP, HTTP). However, in some cases, servers were used by faculty to support curriculum and/or research requirements. We need to capture these requirements so that we can purchase an adequate number of blade servers to meet the need.

We are asking all Engineering faculty and staff who require a dedicated or shared blade server to answer the following questions no later than April 26, 2006. Please return the completed form to Paul Erdmann so he can place the order for the new blade servers.

  1. Name of faculty:

Matthew Kuhn, Peter Osterberg, Sig Lillevik. For use by all engineering faculty, students, and staff. Four (4) blades are requested: three (3) as general Linux hosts, one (1) as a Samba server. For access from Cygwin on Windows or from native Linux/Unix clients.

  1. Brief description of curriculum (to include course number and title) and/or research (to include grant information, if applicable) to support the need for a new blade server:

Numerous Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Courses: EE435, EE438, CS446. Various faculty research.

  1. Operating system needed on blade (e.g., Unix, Linux, Windows):

Linux. A contemporary Linux distribution, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, should be installed (SUSE 10.1 if it is available in time). A 2.6.14+ kernel will support ftpfs and Microsoft's PPTP VPN client.

  1. Additional licensed programs that will be running on the new server:

a) The following list of rpm packages http://faculty.up.edu/kuhn/ecc/rpm-query-short-upibmg.html . This list of 3069 packages was compiled from the current upibmg host, running an older Suse distribution. When applicable, more recent, updated packages should be substituted for those in this list.

b) The following list of Computer Science software: http://www.egr.up.edu/contrib/lillevik/cs_software.htm. When applicable, more recent versions should be substituted for those in this list. The following Windows software would not, of course, be included on the Linux servers: Microsoft Office, FrontPage2003, Project2003, VisualStudio, B2Logic, and Cygwin.

c) Software for file transfer with ftp over ssl and WebDAV should also be installed: cadaver, lftp, davfs2 (0.2.8+), gftp (2.0.18+), kasablanca.

d) "blt" (not to be confused with B2Logic), which can currently be found on upibme.

e) A contemporary version of Ximian Exchange Connector for Evolution, version 2.6+, for accessing email from native Linux hosts.

  1. Type of access required (e.g., faculty on-campus, faculty-off campus, student on-campus, student off-campus):

faculty on-campus, faculty-off campus, student on-campus, student off-campus

  1. Do you require a dedicated blade server or can you share a blade server with other Engineering faculty and/or staff?

Should be shared with all engineering students/faculty/staff

  1. Additional information to assist the technicians in ordering, installing, and configuration the right type of blade (e.g., number of processors, memory requirements):

Four (4) blades. Dual-core Dual-processor x86 blade, 64-bit Intel or AMD (not Itanium), 2GB memory per blade.