Computer Services Unix1 Upgrade
 

by Doug Sewell

On the weekend of December 21-22, 2002, Computer Services staff member Doug Sewell replaced the RS-6000 590 Unix server (“unix1”) with a Sun Ultra-10 server. This upgrade involved close to four months of planning, downloading and building code, and testing, and the actual conversion took roughly twelve hours to complete.

Our clients will first notice the speed with which the server responds to network requests – downloading e-mail, viewing web pages, and logging in to the shell. Other things they might notice are slight differences in the shell, and that programs have been upgraded. The new server gave us a tremendous increase in CPU, disk drive, and network speed and capacity.

From a program development point of view, there are a few changes. In addition to Perl and TCL, the Python scripting language has been installed. The standard GNU tools (make, awk, grep, patch, bison, and flex, among others) have also been installed in /usr/local/bin. Since the processors and operating systems are different, C and C++ code will have to be recompiled (usually a “make clean; ./configure; make” process, or change a few lines in the Makefile). As both AIX and Solaris have roots in System V Release 4 Unix, source code is largely portable between the two.

The transition has not been a few hitches:

   The E-mail servers (POP3 and IMAP) now enforce password expiration and account expiration. This means you will have to change your password every 14 weeks (see the announcements page for information on web-based password changes). If you use IMAP rather than POP3, your mail client will be notified of pending password expiration.
  We’ve found that GCC 3.2 is not reliable for C++ code. GCC 2.95 is installed in /usr/local/gcc295/bin for C++ compilation.
   System and user administration tools are drastically different, so some in-house tools have had to be rewritten, and some new procedures have had to be developed or documented.

Finally, we wish to thank all of our clients for their patience during the transition. We believe the benefits were worth the limited inconveniences that were experienced.