Alachua FreeNet System Upgrade Plan

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This is the plan agreed to at the AFN Technical Committee meeting on 01 September 1996 for upgrading AFN services.

Goals and Restrictions

• Isolate each service, such that a failure of one service (dial-in, mail, web-server, etc) does not also deny use of any other service.
  • Restructure disk space usage so that each host does not have NFS dependencies on all (preferably not any) of the other hosts in the cluster.

• Improve interactive thruput for menu users.

• Plan the upgrade in a way which is easily scalable to more users in the future.

• Purchases now should provide enough headroom to avoid the need for additional nearterm upgrades or major reconfiguration.

• For an NFS-shared mail spool, the mail server must be running a Unix which supports lockd.

Target Configuration

• 486/66 (FreeBSD)
  • IRC interactive users
  • IRC daemons (if too badly behaved to share the P133)

• P133 (FreeBSD)
  • all user home directories/files
  • DNS server
  • NIS master
  • web server
  • FTP server
  • IRC daemons (if well-behaved)

• RS/5000 530H (AIX)
  • the mail spool
  • sendmail
  • POP3 servers
  • IMAP servers
  • majordomo

• P166 - to be purchased (FreeBSD)
  • interactive menu users only

Plan Phases

Each numbered phase must be completed before moving to the next phase. Unnumbered items within a group can be performed in any order.

1. Move part of the workload off of the RS/6000s
   • Move remaining userfile-related workload to the P133:
     • NIS master
     • ftpd
     • annex (terminal-server) daemons
     • IRC daemons (if well-behaved)
     • User home directories/files

   • Move all current workload off of Freenet4
     • IRC interactive workload to 486/66
     • Telnet-connected interactive workload to Freenet2 or Freenet3

2. Move mail-server (sendmail, pop3, imap, majordomo) workload to Freenet4
   • Upgrade memory in Freenet4

3. Port or rewrite menu software to run on FreeBSD, test on P133
   • Simplify by using Lynx and Pine as the complete menu system?
     • Provide `pilot` (companion to pine) for file manipulation.
     • Can use Lynx's "exec:" URL scheme to execute other local programs.
     • Can use Pine's new builtin upload/download facility?
     • Can provide netnews access only thru Pine's builtin pseudo-threaded newreader.

4. Move interactive menu users off of Freenet2 and Freenet3 to a new P166
   • Freenet2 and Freenet3 R.I.P.

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