This page is
continually under construction, and
provides various bits of information for new and old members of CAIA.
Primary file store and compute
hosts
Our web server and ssh gateway to the outside Internet is caia.swin.edu.au, a
FreeBSD 'jail' host.
www.caia.swin.edu.au and caia.caia.swin.edu.au are aliases for
caia.swin.edu.au.
Our internal file server and compute server is mordor.caia.swin.edu.au, a 3Ghz P4 running FreeBSD 7.2
with 1GB RAM and dual 1TB drives in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration.
All user accounts are on this machine. Access to mordor
is either via ssh login
or WinNT
file shares.
SAMBA support for WinNT file sharing
Swinburne ITS does not support
WinNT file sharing across their switched-ethernet/VLAN domains
(officially we use Novell Netware). However, within CAIA we use SAMBA to export mordor.caia.swin.edu.au home directories as WinNT file shares.
You'll need to log into mordor (as
a unix user, using ssh from another unix box or, e.g., PuTTY from a
WIndows box) and run smbpasswd in order to initially setup your
Windows file sharing password before accessing mordor as a Windows file
server. The workgroup
will show up as CAIA, and mordor.caia.swin.edu.au will be (naturally)
"mordor".
Your mordor home directory is
shared as: \\mordor\<username>
(where <username> is your unix login)
File backup strategy
Incremental
backups of all user
accounts on mordor occur once an hour during the day. Backups go to two
separate machines running FreeBSD 8.x, eight 2TByte drives in a RAID-Z2
configuration (two drives may fail without loss of data).
While logged into mordor itself, you can find the most recent version of your home directory at
- /backups_bydate/mordor/home/<username>
Every hour a local snapshot is taken on raidserv2, and kept under
- /backups_bydate/mordor/.zfs/snapshot/<date_time>/home/<username>
where "<date_time>" is in the form YYMMDD_HHMM (year, month, day, hour and minute of the desired snapshot -- e.g. the 8pm snapshot of March 8th 2011 would be 110308_2000)
After ~48hrs the hourly snapshots are deleted, but we keep midnight
snapshots for two weeks. After two weeks we delete the midnight
snapshots except those occurring on day 7, 14, 21, or 28 of the month.
We delete all snapshots that are over ten weeks old. To some degree
these time boundaries are arbitrary -- the main goal is to keep hourly
snapshots for a smallish period of time (allowing people to recover
from accidental deletion during a work day) while not keeping too many
copies of older snapshots.
/backups_bydate/mordor on mordor is an NFS-mount to the
remote machine on which these backups physically reside. This allows
users on mordor to have direct access to their backups without manual
intervention by system administrators.
(See CAIA Technical Report
020927A for a discussion of the previous scheme CAIA used between 2002 and 2010)
Setting
up a CV on caia
On the public website our CVs are expected to be at
http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/<username>
To achieve this, create a ~/public_html/cv directory on mordor, and
inside this directory there should be (at minimum) an index.html file.
The contents of each user's ~/public_html/cv directory are copied over
to caia's http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/ every 30 minutes (on the hour and
half hour).
Creating your public CV is as simple as writing an index.html, placing
it into your ~/public_html/cv directory on mordor, and waiting.
Network bootable tools
Many types of motherboards support 'network
boot' (or 'pxeboot') capabilities. On the CAIA network a machine using
pxeboot will receive an IP address from the DHCP server, and then be
directed to load and launch gpxelinux.0 from pxeboot.caia.swin.edu.au.
The pxeboot'ing machine will then be offered a collection of basic
tools via a simple on-screen menu. As of November 2011 these tools
include memtest86+, clonezilla, DBAN (BootAndNuke) and network bootable
versions of FreeBSD 8. (People on our intranet can poke around here to see what's on offer.)
This service is intended for development
or experimental purposes only -- once your machine is functioning
correctly, please switch to using a static IP address as assigned by
the centre director.
Install FreeBSD
FreeBSD is supported in our lab
environment. It is a free,
complete, and open-source version of Unix. FreeBSD provides a
flexible and proven platform for prototyping advanced networking
protocols and services. In addition, FreeBSD's
Linux-binary compatibility means most user-space applications compiled
for Linux will run out of the box. And perhaps most importantly for
budding entrepreneurs, FreeBSD source is released under the "BSD"
license. Unlike GPL, the BSD license allows derivative works to be
commercialised (without releasing the source modifications) or released
openly as the authors see fit.
- Become
familiar with the installation
instructions from chapter
2 of the online FreeBSD documentation. Pay special attention to
instructions for creating an installation CD or DVD from a binary CD or
DVD image file. Image files are available locally under
http://archive.caia.swin.edu.au/isos/freebsd.
- After
booting from an installer CD or DVD you may chose to continue the
installation direct from the local CD or DVD, or pull the required
content over the network (if the CD drive noise annoys you).
- The local NFS
mount location is archive.caia.swin.edu.au:/cdroms/freebsd/XX (or
136.186.229.34:/cdroms/freebsd/XX if
you have DNS problems), where XX represents the desired distribution. (e.g. "FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-i386-dvd1" for the i386 version of FreeBSD 8.1 installer DVD, etc --see http://archive.caia.swin.edu.au/isos/freebsd for available images, but drop the .iso extension when NFS-mounting a particular installer disk)
Once
you're up and running the primary installation of FreeBSD you can
NFS-mount other disks with:
- /sbin/mount
archive.caia.swin.edu.au:/cdroms/freebsd/XX
<your_local_mount_point2>
A
selection of pre-compiled FreeBSD packages can be found under
<your_local_mount_point>/packages and installed with pkg_add
<package.tgz>, or by running /stand/sysinstall configPackages and
specifying the NFS mount location of the
disk from which you want to grab and install packages.
ISO
images for various FreeBSD releases (required to burn your own
installer CD or DVD) are available via http:
[The NFS
server on archive.caia.swin.edu.au will only serve requests that come
from the following internet networks 136.186.228/24, 136.186.229/24 and 136.186.230/24. HTTP access to the ISOs and
CDROMs is limited to 136.186.228/24 and 136.186.229/24.]
Printing to the CAIA Print Server
CAIA has its own CUPS print server
located
at http://printserver.caia.swin.edu.au:631/. This server shares the
local Lab printer as well as other printers in the local photocopy
room.
If you are running FreeBSD or Linux (which use CUPS), you only need to
add the following line in /etc/cups/client.conf:
ServerName
printserver.caia.swin.edu.au
All printers shared by the printserver will be available locally, to
applications,
such as Acrobat, which do not use the desktop manager's printer
interface.
You may need to restart the applications before they recognise the new
server.
To set Gnome to use the CAIA CUPS server (for Gnome applications), go
to System->Administration->Printing and select Server from the
top menu, and then Connect..., and type printserver.caia.swin.edu.au
into the text box.
The printer EN603_Cannon in the photocopy room can print double sided.
If using Windows, browse to http://printserver.caia.swin.edu.au:631/
(without going through the Swinbure proxy server) and select printers,
then select the printer you would like to add.
Copy the URL from your browser window, and create a new printer with
the Add Printer Wizard.
When prompted, paste the URL you copied as the printer URL. Proceed to
select a suitable driver and finish the wizard.
If you are adding the Canon Photocopier, the correct driver is
available at
\\archive.caia.swin.edu.au\isos\ghost\application_setup_files\canon....
Secure access to lab network
Secure access to the lab network
is provided through a secure shell (ssh) service on caia.swin.edu.au -
contact Grenville for an
account. Ssh clients are available from OpenSSH.org, and are included in
current FreeBSD and Linux distributions. You should not need to
manually install ssh unless you're running a Windows platform.
Ssh is preferred for all
situations where you might have used telnet in the past, inside or
outside the CAIA network. Scp (rcp over ssh) is the preferred method
for file transfers inside and outside the CAIA network
(caia.swin.edu.au and mordor.caia.swin.edu.au do not support any
telnet, rsh, rcp, etc...)
X11 under Windows (Cygwin/XFree86)
The open source (and free) implementation of XFree86 under Cygwin allows X11
clients on other machines in CAIA to be accessed from your Windows
desktop. We do not have local copies here, but the network-based
installation runs quite smoothly. Go to the Cygwin/XFree86 page and click
on the "Install now" link.
Installing VNC
VNC (Virtual Network Computing [note: wikipedia link -- may not always be trustworthy])
allows you to remotely access a Windows desktop as a window on a local
X11 server, or access an remote X11 desktop through a window on a local
Windows machine. VNC was developed by AT&T Labs (Cambridge, UK)
[shut down as of April 2002, archived here
and commercialised here].
There are
a number of VNC server and client applications available online and in
the FreeBSD Packages and Ports collections. Check out:
TightVNC, UltraVNC or RealVNC
(free edition)
Accessing Website Statistics
Comprehensive usage statistics of this website are
available to those inside CAIA.
AWstats web based statistics for www.caia.swin.edu.au
can be accessed here.
(Note: Statistics will not be accessable if you are using the Swinburne
proxy).
Travel Policy
TL;DR (aka "Executive summary"):
Submit to highly-rated conferences. You need Centre Director approval
to travel. If you did not register your conference paper in the CAIA
Submissions register prior to paper being submitted, Centre Director will not approve your travel.
Longer version:
By FICT policy, all CAIA/Telecomms travel to conferences requires Centre Director
authorisation - both to approve any time away from Swinburne, and to
approve the expenditure of funds. This applies to CAIA post-graduate
students, research-only staff and Telecomms group academic staff.
With respect to conference travel approvals, Centre Director will
evaluate your application based on its source of funding. We generally
view funding as coming from one of two categories: Faculty funds (from
annual budgets provided for student and staff travel), and external
project funds (e.g. ARC grants, industry grants, etc)
With respect to external project funds, Centre Director
will approve conference travel that uses external project funds if the
project's "owner" (e.g. Chief Investigator in the case of ARC grants,
or similar person for industry grants) assures that the expenditure
appropriately supports their project's academic and business goals.
With respect to Faculty funds for CAIA/Telecomms travel, Centre Director will apply the following guidelines based on 2010 ARC ERA rankings or reasonable evidence of equivalence:
- Did
you register the paper with our Centre Admin support (currently
Catherine Lineham) for the CAIA Submissions register at the time you
submitted it to the conference for review? If not, no approval
- "A" ranked conferences are acceptable both domestically and internationally. As a rule we should be targeting these conferences
- "B" ranked conferences are okay domestically, or if you have external project funds to support international travel
- "C"
ranked conferences are generally to be avoided (i.e., find your own
funding). However, conference travel to a C ranked conference might be
approved if it is domestic _and_ publishing the paper in that
conference is part of an agreed strategy to ensure timely publication
and getting our work 'on the record' in IEEE Xplore or ACM Digital
Library, etc. You'll need a good reason to convince me your work cannot
wait to be refined and published in a more highly ranked conference.
(In addition, research-active academic staff will not receive support for submitting first-authored papers to C ranked conferences.)
- Unranked conferences -- discuss the business rationale with Centre Director first. There may be staff-development reasons for your attendance to be funded
Please
bear in mind that the budget for Faculty-funded travel is finite each
year. This imposes an upper bound on the number of conferences you can
attend using Faculty funds, regardless of the rank of the conferences.
Consequently, if you're intending to develop a paper for any conference please discuss travel and registration funding with Centre Director
before submission. Otherwise, even if your paper is accepted you may
end up funding the trip yourself (or having to withdraw the paper).
(Note: ERA no longer publishes conference rankings. The 2010 rankings
should be used as a guide,
http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era_2010/archive/era_journal_list.htm I am
open to evidence that e.g. a previously B-ranked conference should now
be considered an A-ranked conference.)
Lab Security
Security in the EN605 lab (and associated CAIA rooms) boils down to
keeping the lab secure and limiting unknown visitors. More specifically:
1. No sessional consultations
At any given time some lab members will also be employed by Swinburne
as sessional tutors, practical class demonstrators or lecturers.
However, your CAIA lab access is quite separate from your sessional
work. Student consultations that you undertake as part of your
sessional work must not be performed inside the CAIA lab.
2. General visitors
In regards to EN605 (main lab) and EN613 (behind the lecture theatre),
our policy is that you please do not invite visitors to CAIA unless you
are personally present to host your visitor.
If an outsider comes to the lab door and says they're here to visit
someone, you are under no obligation to let them in - go find the
person they're visiting (the host), and the host will let their visitor
into the lab. If their host is not present, the visitor should wait
outside.
3. Unknown people in the lab
If you find someone unknown in the lab who doesn't appear to have a
host, please contact Centre Director or another member of Telecomms
Academic staff to verify. If we're not around, please contact Swinburne
Security on x3333 (if you have suspicions about the unknown person's
demeanour).
It is also worth noting that even though we try to keep control of the
lab during working hours, personal and/or valuable items should be
generally be kept out of sight as much as practical.
