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During FY1999, the Distributed Systems Group (DSG) created a plan for the consolidation of services onto fewer machines and the reduction of inter-machine dependencies to minimize system downtime on production servers that depend on these services. There were, for example, servers that depended on three different servers (file server, DNS server, mail spool directory server) for a user to perform day-to-day activities. If any one of these servers was unavailable then no work could be performed. So far a number of activities outlined in the plan have been carried out and will continue to be into FY2000.The critical services and the server responsible for them can be summarized as follows:
Crestone servers
- Network Information Service (NIS) - user ID and group database used by UNIX workstations
- Domain Name Service (DNS) - IP-address-to-name translation for SCD desktops
- Print Spooling - centralizes administration of printers and large disk area for print jobs
- Mail spool service - large spool area for mail delivery storage
Eolus server
- Autoclient - Sun workstation central administration
Niwot server
- Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or sendmail - mail message delivery and receipt
- Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) - mail message viewing and editing
File service server
- File service - used by servers/workstations to automount file systems
- Network Time Protocol (NTP) - keeps time synchronous across all systems
Phoenix servers
- Domain Name Service (DNS) - IP-address-to-name translation
The overall goal of server reduction will be the consolidation of services onto a few well fortified systems (i.e. fault-tolerant, or systems with a backup system). This will involve having one system dedicated to strictly SCD Sun workstation dependencies. This system will have centralized control over the Sun workstations. This will help simplify system administration of such tasks as workstation operating system upgrades, patch installation, and adding workstation services. If for some reason this system becomes unavailable, only SCD Sun workstations will be affected. Other current dependencies not currently affecting SCD Sun workstations will be moved to the fileserver system with the exception of DNS service, which uses a high-availability configuration (phoenix).
In order to reduce dependencies without any major disruptions to SCD, the new workstation configuration, comprised of two systems called mesa1 and mesa2, will be run in parallel with the current crestone complex comprised of dsg1 and dsg2. The new system configuration is called "flatirons," where mesa1 is the primary workstation production node, and mesa2 is a hot standby node. The services will be gradually phased off the crestone complex to avoid disrupting the user work environment.