cs.wpi.edu
This machine is the department's most commonly used interactive login server. A “login server” means that people simply login there and do small tasks, like reading their email or editing files. This is distinct from a compute server which is used non-interactively for the most part–most of a compute machine's time is spent crunching long-running jobs.
cs.wpi.edu used to be named “csopt2.wpi.edu” until the previous cs.wpi.edu died and we used csopt2.wpi.edu to replace it.
cs.wpi.edu runs a relatively recent version of SuSE Linux and started being unstable in December of 2008. Voorhis believes it has bad RAM but the machine isn't being enough of a pain in the neck for him to take it down for a comprehensive check of its memory since it only dies once every few weeks.
cs.wpi.edu services
- cs.wpi.edu runs SAMBA and does authentication for all the CS DOMAIN pcs in the department. When you type your password into a CS Domain PC in the department and hit return, cs.wpi.edu is the machine that decides whether or not you get onto the PC. Since normal users are also logged onto the same server, a user that boggs the server down with a compute process or some other resrouce-intensive process can also adversely affect PC logins.
- cs.wpi.edu is also our main printer server (we use the LPD protocol from Unix to serve printers, samba does printer sharing to the PCs). It accumulates jobs sent from the department's PCs and Unix machines, and sending these jobs off to the several printers. This is problematic for the same reason that SAMBA service is–the machine also has many users on it and users don't make for a quiet, stable network server.
The two services above should be removed from cs.wpi.edu onto a dedicated server that does not accept user logins.
- cs.wpi.edu also is the password server and group membership server in the department. Password changes made here are propigated out to other “general access” CS Department machines. I'd like to stop this “home grown” practice and start using a more widely used system, like Kerberos.