 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group melbpc.org.au - our Internet link Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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Much has been said about the origins of our Internet service, the people involved and the number of years it has taken to get one. Now that we have had one for over a year, it is time to look at the present and the future. In this article I will concentrate on the service as it has evolved at our premises.
The old site
We would not be in our present, happy situation without the cooperation last year of the Australian Public Access Network Association (APANA) and werple, the premier public access site at the time. Last year APANA needed us to fund a quarter of its ISDN line costs and in return our computer was configured as a clone of werple, although it lacked the news and uucp feed components. It featured eight, 14,400 bps modems and membership was held at 350 users. The average caller logged on for 22 minutes.
The present system
When werple became a commercial operation, we moved our NetBSD-powered PC, now known as koala, to Albert Road but several challenges had to be tackled at once. We needed a news server, and chose the Sun Netra, named wombat. It runs the Solaris flavour of UNIX. We had to replace the modems with 16 V.34/V.FC units. The old terminal server, bilby, could support a maximum of 15 lines and its top speed was limited to 57,600 bps, so it was time to get a more modern unit, the 71-line Xylogics Annex 4000, dubbed wallaby. We were encouraging new users to go to a SLIP/PPP account rather than struggle with UNIX, so we installed another NetBSD PC, emu. We needed a 64 Kbps ISDN link to the service provider, so we purchased a Cisco router, which has a more traditional name, gw, being a gateway device. The final component, an old PC named marble is merely a local terminal. Redundancy is a key design principle.
How it works
Although the user sees a working system, it is always in a state of development. As this is being written, bilby is the main point of dial-up access, but it should be wallaby soon. The SLIP or PPP user chooses the "s" option and is using the resources of emu, where most of the user mail resides. There are no "home directories" here for users; a mail file is all they own. Shell users choose "m" and reach their personal home directory on koala. The handful of uucp users have neither a personal directory nor the concept of a manual login. Their mail and news packets wait for their next poll on koala.
In a mail context, these computers are also known as popa and popb respectively. Why have two names? This gives us the flexibility to move mail operations to a new computer (temporarily during a system crash, for example) without inconveniencing users, who have configured their software packages with these names. Likewise, we ask users to omit the machine name from their e-mail addresses for the same reason. A user with accounts on both machines has to pick up mail from popb.
Our home pages live on koala. We run the CERN software for this purpose. User home pages live on emu. We operate a mailing list package called majordomo, which helps us run several mailing lists both for ourselves and for the wider user group community. We run clever scripts to make life easy, such as the ability for outsiders to get a Melb PC membership form simply by sending a blank message to form@melbpc.org.au.
Although we hosted a web pledge form for the Royal Children's Hospital Good Friday Appeal, the press gave it a passing mention and it was largely ignored during the telethon. For once, the magic "I" word did not work even though it was a possible first for Australia. We raised about $75 for the appeal through this method.
Security
We inherited a very secure system from werple and have continued to build upon it. Sometimes, it makes life difficult for us, but that's a good sign. We do not keep users' credit card information on the system unlike some other sites that were in the news recently.
Operating philosophy
melbpc.org.au is run on conservative principles, which must frustrate some of our more enthusiastic users who have sampled other sites. We are not trying to offer something simply because others do so. The reasons range from a matter of priorities to resource optimisation to legal concerns. We discourage anonymous usage and incorrect headers on mail and news. Some users need to be reminded that they joined a user group, not just another Internet service. Sometimes we receive up to 200 messages a day and personal attention is not possible. Hence we use the BBS as a support mechanism so that users can help each other.
Future plans
We built the system expecting to get about 700 users initially, perhaps increasing to 1000 within a year. We have reached about 1300 users and the strain on the access point is showing. Instead of doubling the number of lines, the committee is going to triple it to 48. Thank you for your support and take your time savouring this new dimension.
Reprinted from the June 1995 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
