Student Services Server Proposal IEEE Computer Society, Purdue University Derrick Kearney, President derrick@purdue.edu Seth Heckard, Former President sdh@purdue.edu Michael Shuey, Staff Adviser shuey@purdue.edu Overview The Purdue University Computer Society is a student chapter of the national IEEE Computer Society. Our goals are to spread knowledge about computer engineering and technology, to get students involved in outside of class engineering projects, and to provide computing resources to students and student organizations. Every year, the Computer Society is involved with organizing events related to the fields of computer science and engineering. Computer Society membership is open to students of any major, however most members are studying engineering or computer science. The Computer Society has been providing computing services to students since we received our first computer almost ten years ago. We have over 200 accounts on our servers, and add about 20 or 30 new accounts per semester. On average, we gain three active members per semester. Student organizations are also welcome to use our resources for web space and mailing lists, and several are using our services. Our members have plans for programming projects, and we envision many more projects in the future. This growth in projects will soon exceed our current resources. The computer that is currently hosting our services, csociety.ecn.purdue.edu, also acts as a workstation in our office for our members to use. This proposal is for a dedicated, server-only computer to handle the increasing load placed on our systems by new members and projects. We cannot meet our goals without additional funding and support from outside organizations. Need for Expansion Our current server, csociety.ecn.purdue.edu, is physically located in our office in the Electrical Engineering Building. Currently it is set up as a workstation, while performing its server duties in the background. This is not an ideal solution; however, it is necessary as we are limited in machinery. To reduce the load on csociety, we have discouraged its use as a workstation. However, this is not ideal as sometimes we need all three workstations when the office is full of people. If we were able to acquire a new computer, we would use it exclusively as a server and move all tasks to the system. Our current csociety would be renamed and would be used as a true workstation. Project Summary The Computer Society has provided Linux accounts to students and staff for over five years for educational purposes. We provide all the tools and compilers that our users expect and need. These accounts are used for familiarization and learning the UNIX operating environment, software development, and for personal use. We currently have the following projects: Administration of our network. This gives people experience with administering a network of computers running various UNIX systems. Members must keep up to date with security updates, disk space usage, user accounts, and abuse on our system. CVS collaboration site. We envision hosting a service similar to SourceForge which Purdue students can use to work on homework or personal projects. We believe that encouraging collaborative development is important to prepare for future employment. Clustering. We have recently received a donation of several retired machines that the SIGOS (a special interest group focusing on operating systems) group is using to study clustering and its relationships to software and operating systems. FTP and CVSup mirrors. We host world-class free software mirrors, and are one of the few universities to do so. Our mirrors are heavily used by both students and faculty at Purdue, as well as people around the globe. LDAP implementation. We use LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) to manage our authentication so that members can have the same login and password on each of our machines. Library database system. We have a few bookshelves of computer books which we allow our members to borrow. We will create a checkout system to better keep track of our books. Web page project. We recently redesigned our web page, using such technologies as XHTML, CSS, and HTML::Mason. This project is complete, however it requires updating and minor adjustments. Also, the Computer Society would like to offer an alumni forwarding system by which Purdue graduates would be able to keep a consistent Purdue email address. If we decided to pursue this project, it would require resources that we do not currently have, as we expect that this project would become quite popular. Services Used The Computer Society currently runs a myriad of services on csociety. Apache, an open-source web server, is used to serve our web pages, along with web pages for other student organizations. We use virtual hosts, a system where multiple domain names can be hosted from the same server, extensively. Bind serves DNS from csociety. DNS stands for domain name system, a protocol to resolve internet addresses to computer names. Postfix, an open-source mail server, is used to deliver and store our mail. We also have over 60 mailing lists for student organizations and our use. GNU Mailman is the software used to run these mailing lists, and we keep archives for each. SSH (secure shell) is used for remote connectivity. Items Requested We request a server that meets the following specifications: Dual processor 1+ GHz Pentium III system A gigahertz-class processor is a must, since we would like to utilize this server for many years. A dual processor system would increase the cost slightly, but provide a greater useful life for the server. 1GB RAM Since this server will be running several processes, including web and database servers, large amounts of RAM will be needed to prevent swapping to disk. 72GB of storage (SCSI) This server will host the home directories for all our users, as well as mail for each user. Also, web pages and archives of mailing lists can use sizable amounts of storage space. As the current csociety has almost 30GB of space, almost all in use, more space would give us greater flexibility. Capability to mount in a 19" standard rack is preferred We would save precious office space by mounting the server in our rack. Linux compatibility We will be running Linux on the server, more specifically the Debian distribution. Linux support of the hardware is a must, and all the systems specified below are capable of running the Linux operating system. The following pre-configured servers meet our criteria: Dell PowerEdge 2550 2U rack-mounted server Specifications: Two Pentium III 1.13GHz processors, 1GB SDRAM, dual channel on-board RAID controller, two 36GB 10,000 RPM SCSI hard disk, and three year warranty. Price: $3,760.00 before shipping (gathered from Dell's online store on Sep. 1, 2002) Compaq ProLiant DL380 rack-mounted server Specifications: Two Pentium III 1.26GHz processors, 1GB Registered ECC SDRAM, Smart Array 5i SCSI controller, two 36GB 10,000 RPM SCSI hard disk, and three year warranty. Price: $5,389.00 before shipping (gathered from Compaq's online store on May 3, 2002) IBM xSeries 330 (867432X) rack-mounted server Specifications: Two Pentium III 1.13GHz processors, 1 GB SDRAM, Integrated Ultra160 SCSI controller, two 36GB 10,000 RPM SCSI hard disk, and base warranty. Price: $4,801.30 before shipping (gathered from IBM's online store on May 3, 2002) HP Server LP 2000r, 2U rack-mounted server Specifications: Two Pentium III 1.13GHz processors, 1 GB SDRAM, Embedded SCSI A controller, two 36.4GB U3 HS LP 10,000 RPM hard disks, and standard warranty. Price: $5,796.00 before shipping (gathered from HP's online store on May 3, 2002) Additionally, csociety is currently on the Engineering Computer Network backup system. ECN requires an one-time charge of $10 per gigabyte of disk. Since we have 72GB of disk specified, we would incur a $720 charge. Conclusion The Computer Society has been an integral part of Purdue's high-tech student organizations for several years. Many Purdue organizations use csociety as a provider for web hosting, mailing lists, and other resources. Our members also use our resources for their projects, and the number of projects we have undertaken has grown significantly in the last year alone. We expect future growth in our organization, and the only way that we can keep up with that growth is to expand our facilities. We believe that a new dedicated server would be a great addition to our network as it can offer us capabilities that we do not currently have. Also, we will take the current csociety and put it in use as a workstation, which we will use since our office lab has become more popular lately. We believe that the only way to continue to meet our members' and organizations' needs will be to add a dedicated server to handle these extra tasks.