Hardware and Computer Knowledge Society

Wed. Feb. 6th 2008 ECE208a 5:30p

Same bat time, same bat channel. We talk about stuff, and things and it's going to be awesome. Come with ideas.

To login you'll need to visit http://www.hacks.arizona.edu/user . I also made recent comments visible on the homepage to make them easier to find at a glance. Peace out, Shawn

In order to ensure continued reliability for the LDAP directory server. I have configured the DNS cluster with a new service IP served by all the machines. Kiyo and Bahamut are now read-only slave servers to Smaug.

If the master fails, the others will answer read request and allow auth to continue to function. All machines and the main website have been updated to use the new dns entry ldap.hacks.arizona.edu->150.135.84.4 . Please update any applications that use Smaug directly to query the service address to take advantage of the new fault tolerance.

Adam and I spent an evening working on some HACKS hosts on Tuesday.

Two more of the quad processor 700 MHz boxes are installed, LDAP auth enabled with the shared home directories. The hostnames are (temporarily) lizard1.hacks and lizard3.hacks [lizard2 is refusing to POST right now...]. This are destined to become part of the GP club shell cluster.

Feel free to login and look around. Note: I added Quota to the home directories to prevent a single user from hosing the partition. I split the free space equally among the members. This was mostly a test and can be changed, but each user ended up with ~17.3G.

There has been a lot of talk about LDAP since we decided to roll it out for central HACKS authentication.

LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access protocol. LDAP is a protocol for exchanging objects over a variety of links. LDAP does not specify how the information is stored. So, an LDAP server is just a computer that takes formatted text objects and presents them over a socket in an organized way.

The primary uses for LDAP are central authentication, online phone books, and cryptographic keyservers.

Examples of LDAP servers @ the University of Arizona include NetID (authentication server for many campus services including e-mail, WebReg, employee link, ...), UA Phonebook (ldap.arizona.edu; an online phonebook containing information about students, faculty and staff).