ORBnet Hardware and Software Details

Compiled by Craig Dewick

You can go straight to software details, or read through the hardware details first...

ORBnet Hardware Details

ORBnet Hardware Entity Data Table
	The gateway that handles traffic between the local network and the APANA Sydney regional hub site is a Cisco 1603 ISDN router. It has the following features: - Motorola 68360 processor supported by 32 MB of DRAM and 8 MB of flash memory (storing the IOS image), - 1 Basic-Rate ISDN (BRI) port which is used for the main link back to the APANA Sydney hub site. - Support in Cisco's IOS for using data-over-voicebearer calls with Telstra's ISDN Home service. At the APANA Sydney regional hub site I have a Cisco 1003 single-BRI router managing the upstream end of my network's main link.
I have created a web page specifically to assist people in learning how to configure Cisco 1000, 2500, 1600, 2600 and 3600 series ISDN routers to support DoV (ie. Data-over-Voice) calls (which takes advantage of an undocumented feature of the Telstra's ISDN Home service).
	The main dial-up access server used by APANA Sydney members (which is also a secondary server for Usenet newsgroups, DNS, email and WWW proxy), is a Sun Netra T1125 server which is named 'Jedi'. It has the following major features: - 300 Mhz UltraSparc-II CPU module, - 512 MB of RAM, - 73 GB of hard disk storage, - high-speed PCI serial multiplexer boards from Magma. The analog modems used for providing dial-in support are rack-mounting V.34bis (33k6 bps) capable ProRack card modems designed and manufactured by NetComm here in Australia.
	The FTP server machine provides anonymous FTP and WWW access to a wide range of archived data, including MP3 music files, a large collection of erotica, and other material. The hardware is based around a Sun Sparcstation 20 clone system, and it's named 'Treefern': - 85 MHz SuperSPARC-II CPU module (Sun SM81 CPU), - 128 MB of RAM, - 18 GB of hard disk storage, Note that anonymous access to the FTP server is restricted to certain domains, and that due to the erotica archive users should exercise caution when accessing that material. Refer to the Treefern Conditions of Use for more information about access limitations, etc.
	The Website hosting server provides website and domain hosting services to non-profit organisations. It's a Cobalt dedicated server and is named 'Ziri'. It has the following features: - MIPS embedded RISC processor, - 64 MB of RAM, - 13 GB of hard disk storage, - Customised Linux operating system with web-based server management engine,
	The primary mail, DNS, Usenet news, NTP and WWW proxy server, is a PCI-based Sun Ultra 2 clone system. It's named 'Yoda' and has the following major features: - 300 MHz Ultrasparc-II CPU module with 2 MB of cache per module, - 512 MB of RAM, - 72 GB of hard disk storage.
	This machine, which is my own personal workstation, is a Sun Ultra 60 system. It's named 'Lios' and has the following major features: - dual 360 MHz Ultrasparc-II CPU modules with 4 MB of cache per module, - 1 GB of RAM, - 100+ GB of hard disk storage, - Elite3D-m3 3D-accelerated colour framebuffer, - SunVideo+ (Osprey 1500) PCI audio-visual capture card capable of up to 30 fps video capture, - in-built 2-channel, 16-bit audio.
Other Systems
	Another machine, which is an experimental platform for Sparc-based Linux OS's, is a Sun SS600MP (aka 4/6x0) system built with a 4/6x0 motherboard installed into a circa-1987 Sun 3/150 3-slot deskside SunVME tower case. It hasn't been given a name although it has the following features: - 150 MHz Ross Hypersparc CPU module, - 128 MB of RAM, - 18 GB of hard disk storage, - TGX+ Sbus 8-bit vector-accelerated 2D colour framebuffers with 4 MB of VRAM.
	Yet another machine is set up specifically for my wife Tiffany and our children to use. It's a Sun SparcEngine Ultra AXi based workstation which is named 'Circlet'. It has the following major features: - 440 Mhz Sun Ultrasparc-IIi CPU module with 2 MB cache, - 1 GB MB of RAM, - 73 GB of hard disk storage, - Soundblaster PCI-128 16-bit audio processor card, - Elite3D-m3 24-bit 3D-accelerated colour framebuffer.
If you have an interest, either as hobbyist/enthusiast/experimenter, or as a serious professional working in the IT industry, in Sun hardware and software and things relating to that, you should check out the SunShack, which is a website created, maintained and developed by me as a resource specifically for people who work in the after-market part of IT supporting the end of the IT industry which Sun as a large corporate entity (particularly outside the USA) doesn't want anything to do with...

ORBnet Software Details

Information about the public domain software and shareware packages used here is detailed below.

ORBnet Open-Source Software Package Table
General Applications
	The WWW proxy server used on Jedi is Squid, an open-source Internet object cache server package than can also be used as a httpd accelerator to speed up HTTP server response. The server is highly configurable to suit almost any WWW caching task imaginable.
	The HTTP server used here is Apache, an open-source web server package which was derived from the NCSA's HTTP server project. The Apache project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for various modern desktop and server operating systems, such as UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server which provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.
	Muhammad A. Muquit's WWW counter CGI program is used to keep track of raw hits on all of the web pages on this system and a few other machines on my local network.
	The standard mail transfer agent is Postfix. Postfix is a highly-robust and configurable mail server which attemps to be fast, easy to administer, and secure, while at the same time being sendmail-compatible enough so that it is a complete drop-in replacement for sendmail and adds lots of special features for dealing with unsolicited email.
	Alongside Postfix's own malware-defeating abilities, the key tool to fighting spam and unsolicited email is SpamAssassin. Written in Perl, SpamAssassin is a highly flexible package which uses a wide range of advanced heuristic and statistical analysis tests on mail headers and body text to identify 'spam', also known as unsolicited bulk email.
	I have built, installed and use frequently many of the free software pacakges produced for the GNU Project (part of the Free Software Foundation). Packages such as gcc (an ANSI-compatible C/C++ compiler), ghostscript (PostScript language interpreter), gzip (GNU's data compression/decompression utility), bash (GNU's Born Again SHell), and several others are all in frequent use. Since Solaris 8 (released in 2000 MCR), Sun has been including many of the common GNU applications in the standard Solaris distributions, which is an excellent move by Sun in the right direction towards supporting the open-source software community!
	Jedi and Yoda use BIND (the Berkely Internet Name Daemon) from the Internet Software Consortium to handle nameserver lookups. This nameserver is much more configurable, and more secure, than the nameserver daemons shipped with most network-ready operating systems. Jedi and Yoda also use the INN (Inter-Network News) package, which also comes from the Internet Software Consortium, to manage the local news spool, as well as handle incoming NNTP and NNRP connections. If you're interested in obtaining optimum performance from Inn on your news server, there's an excellent site full of information about tuning Inn to be more efficient. I've used some of the ideas with Inn on this machine. (note: this link appears to be dead) Another place to look is Dave Barr's Inn page.
SUCK	Partnered with the Inn software is Robert Yetman's Suck package, which is a program used to grab news from a remote NNTP news server and bring it to your local machine, without the remote server doing anything special. If you have read permission on the server, you can use suck. Suck does not use the NEWNEWS command, hated by many administrators.
	OpenSSH is a FREE version of the SSH protocol suite of network connectivity tools that increasing numbers of people on the Internet are coming to rely on. Many users of telnet, rlogin, ftp, and other such programs might not realize that their password is transmitted across the Internet unencrypted, but it is. OpenSSH encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other network-level attacks. Additionally, OpenSSH provides a myriad of secure tunneling capabilities, as well as a variety of authentication methods. OpenSSH uses the GPL'd OpenSSL library to provide many of it's cryptography features.
	I use PINE from the University of Washington to access email and newsgroups. PINE (a Program for Internet News and Email) is a tool for sending, receiving and managing electronic messages that has been developed specifically with both novice and so-called power users in mind.
PPP	Open-source PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) TCP/IP software originally created by Paul Mackerras at the Australian National University in Canberra is used to provide provide dial-up PPP support on Jedi for APANA Sydney members. Sun has totally re-worked Paul's code and since the Solaris 8 02/02 release the software has been a standard part of the Solaris distribution thanks to the work of software engineers James Carlson and Adi Masputra.
UUCP	Jedi's UUCP support is provided using the Taylor UUCP package written by Ian Lance Taylor.
	Info-ZIP's zip and unzip utilities are free, portable, high-quality versions of the Zip and UnZip compressor-archiver utilities that are compatible with the DOS-based PKZIP by PKWARE, Inc.. Sun supplies the fill zip/unzip package as a standard part of their Solaris distribution.
	For remote access to email, Jedi uses Qpopper (written by software engineers at Qualcomm), which is the most widely-used open-source server for the POP3 protocol. This server allows users to access their mail using any POP3 client (such as Netscape and others). Qpopper supports the latest standards, and includes a large number of optional features. Qpopper is normally used with standard UNIX mail transfer and delivery agents such as sendmail or smail.
	The webalizer package from Bradford Barrett is a powerful analysis tool for web server log files. It's used to generate web-based statistical presentations about Jedi's Apache http server and Squid web proxy server.
General Library Packages
	The Berkeley Database library from Sleepycat Software is a programmatic toolkit that provides high-performance embedded database support for both traditional and client/server applications. It is used by many applications, including BSD Sendmail, and others.
blah	libpcap from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories is a specialised packet capture library that supports both SunOS 4.x (BSD-based) and SunOS 5.x (SYSV-based) on Sun Sparcstations.
	libpng (PNG = Portable Network Graphics) provides a portable image formatting and manipulation framework specifically created to address the inadequacies of other formats such as GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and TIFF (Tag Image File Format). PNG's compression is among the best that can be had without losing image information and without paying patent fees, and the format also provides powerful compression filtering, variable transparency (using 'alpha-' or 'mask-channels'), gamma correction, interlacing and file integrity features.
	zlib is designed to be a free, general-purpose, legally unencumbered -- that is, not covered by any patents -- lossless data-compression library for use on virtually any computer hardware and operating system. The zlib data format is itself portable across platforms. It is also a pre-requisite for libpng.
blah	The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) image compression/decompresion library and related utilities from the Independent JPEG Group provide software support for one of the most commonly-used image file compression techniques. The ISO JPEG standards committee has their own web site, however the IJG is not affiliated with the ISO committee.
blah	The TIFF (Tag Image File Format) image compression/decompression library supports a different format used by quite a few desktop publishing applications and other image manipulation and transport software. The library was originally developed by Sam Leffler, but is now maintained by Michael Welles.
X-Windows Applications
	The main web browser I use here is Netsc(r)ape, a full-featured WWW browser that sets the standard for all other web browsers to follow. Unfortunately it's very difficult to get it to run reliably when using some of the Java-based extensions, and bug reports are generally ignored. An open-source alternative to the commercial Netscape product, is Mozilla, which is closely related to Netscape but developed seperately.
	Another alternative to Netsc(r)ape is Chimera, an X-based, public-domain and HTML-2.0 compatible browser written by John Kilburg which does not require Motif (it uses MIT's Xlib instead). Netsc(r)ape might be all-singing and all-dancing, but it's not public-domain (unless you download the source to Mozilla).
blah	I also make regular use of Lynx, a non-graphical browser that works on any cursor-addressable, cell-based display device (such as a serial terminal, or any curses-oriented display).
	I make extensive us of John Bradley's XV image viewer. XV has the uncanny nack of being the most versatile of all image display applications at transforming image files between different formats.
	Another image viewer I use regularly is the display utility from the ImageMagick suite of imaging applications, written by John Cristy. ImageMagick is different to XV in that it is much more heavy-duty in it's approach to image manipulation that XV is, and each manipulation function is set up as a seperate stand-alone application that can be used by other software.
blah	For general image creation and editing, I use Torsten Martinsen's XPaint package. It's a wonderfully useful tool, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a generic X-based image creation package which is not reliant on paying huge commercial license fees (as you do with things like Photoshop).
	A more structured, CAD-like approach to image creation and editing is offered by Xfig, which is currently being developed and maintained by Brian V. Smith. Xfig is an interactive drawing tool which runs under X Window System Version 11 Release 4 (X11R4) or later, on most UNIX-compatible platforms. It is freeware, and you can read more about Xfig's capabilities in it's user manual.
	My favourite X-based game is Greg Lesher's Xbattle, a concurrent multi-player game which combines elements of strategy with arcade-like action to capture a wide range of military scenarios. The game board is a matrix of game cells which can be occupied by troops of various colors, with troop strength indicated by the size of colored markers within a cell. Troops are commanded by clicking the mouse near the edge of an occupied cell in the direction that movement is to take place.
	Another X-based game I am starting to get into is XShipWars from Wolfpack Development. XShipWars is a highly customizable multiplayer space gaming system designed for play entirely over the Internet. It is the first completed and stable game for Linux written on Linux and has been ported to a variety of other platforms (such as Solaris).
	Many applications make use of the excellent open-source releases of the Tcl/Tk (Tcl = Tool Control Language) scripting packages from Scriptics - the Tcl Plaform Company.
	One such suite of applications which relies on Tcl/Tk's versatility is the collection of multimedia conferencing tools from the UCL Networked Multimedia Research Group in the UK. This collection of tools includes applications such as the vic video conferencing tool (which supports the Sbus and PCI SunVideo cards!), and other applications for audio conferencing, electronic whiteboarding, session directory managers, etc.
	I've been collating X-windows based (and non-X based) Unix audio applications for a number of years, mostly because Sun's audio hardware and software support has improved vastly since the rapid development of the Internet and other multimedia platforms.
	Jamie Zawinski's xscreensaver package is the most complete and diverse screensaver and screen locking package available for X. xscreensaver waits until the keyboard and mouse have been idle for a period, and then runs a graphics demo chosen at random. It turns off as soon as there is any mouse or keyboard activity. It can also lock the screen (immediately, after a longer idle period, or on demand).
	Derek B. Noonburg's Xpdf is a viewer for PDF (Portable Document Format) files. (These are also sometimes also called 'Acrobat' files, from the name of Adobe's PDF software.) Xpdf is designed to be small and efficient. It does not use the Motif or Xt libraries, and it can use standard X fonts.
blah	Richard Huveneers' xtoolwait program noticably decreases the startup time of an X session by reducing the load on the X server and the OS. I highly recommended it!
	Xtacy is a neato graphics hack for X11, and is authored and maintained by Jeremy Johnson. It is basically an X utility which draws a pattern inside a window and cycles the colour palette in various ways to manipulate the image and create all sorts of trippy effects!
	Xanim is a program for playing a wide variety of animation, video and audio formats under X11. It was written mainly for machines running unix(or a unix derivatives), but can also be compiled and run on VAX VMS machines(although without audio support). It has also been ported to the Amiga and to W95/NT. Xanim's main focus is multimedia files in avi, quicktime, sgi, and a whole host of other formats.
	Xmcd is a full-featured CD Player utility package including xmcd, a CD Player for the X window system using the Motif graphical user interface and cda, a command-line driven, text mode CD Player which also features a curses-based, screen-oriented mode.
	Virtual Network Computing is an application from AT&T Research Labs in the UK. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing desktop environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures. VNC is quite different to other systems: - No state is stored at the viewer. This means you can leave your desk, go to another machine, whether next door or several hundred kilometres away, reconnect to your desktop from there and finish the sentence you were typing. Even the cursor will be in the same place. - It is small and simple. - It is truly platform-independent. A desktop running on a Linux machine may be displayed on a PC. Or a Solaris machine. Or any number of other architectures. - It is sharable. One desktop can be displayed and used by several viewers at once, allowing CSCW-style applications. - It is free! You can download it, use it, and redistribute it under the terms of the GNU Public Licence.