December 2004
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* Beowulf Cluster. In support of research computing, Kai Li has made a
number of his machines available to the department for cluster
computing. Brian Jones has taken these machines and, with input from
members of the CS department community, created a cluster with
48 CPUs with the capacity to grow to over 100 CPUs. Each CPU is
933 MHz. The cluster is expected to go live this week. For more
information, please sign up for the local mailing list,
beowulf@lists.cs.princeton.edu by visiting:
https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
* New Web Site. We are in the process of upgrading the Department's
core web presence. By "core web" we mean the departmental pages and
not personal or project pages. The upgrades will occur in three
semi-independent phases. First, we are upgrading the look-and-feel
along with some content changes. Second, we are making changes to
make it easier for our administrative staff to keep the contents of
the web site up-to-date. And, third, we are making changes to the
underlying system to make it easier for the CS Staff to maintain
the system.
The first phase, a new look-and-feel, will begin to be rolled out
this month. The first thing visitors will notice is a more uniform
look and improved navigation. We will be including more photos in
the new site. If you have any to contribute, please send them (or
provide a link) to me. Photos can be of the building (in different
seasons), of people in the department, or related to projects (e.g.,
generated by the graphics group). Be sure to include a caption
indicating the subject, the photographer, and the year it was taken
or created.
One downside of the upgraded web pages, is that much of the content
will be moving. Where feasible, we will provide temporary redirects
and other temporary navigational aids to visitors. CS Staff can also
provide transitional assistance in moving links. Details will be
announced later.
* LDAP Service. We are preparing to launch an LDAP service which can
be integrated with many end-user applications. Most notably, it can
provide an always up-to-date address book for e-mail applications
(and, depending on the e-mail client, automatic address completion).
The LDAP service will be replacing NIS for the purposes of
authentication. Roll-out is expected in early 2005.
* USENIX LISA'04 Conference Papers. At the recent Large Installation
System Administration Conference in Atlanta, CS Staff members
presented two refereed papers based on tools we have developed for
in-house use:
PatchMaker: A Physical Network Patch Manager Tool
Joseph R. Crouthamel, James M. Roberts, Christopher M. Sanchez,
and Christopher J. Tengi
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/patchmaker/docs/
autoMAC: A Tool for Automating Network Moves, Adds, and Changes
Christopher J. Tengi, James M. Roberts, Joseph R. Crouthamel,
Chris M. Miller, and Christopher M. Sanchez
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/autoMAC/
* ProofPoint Spam Filter. Also for early 2005, we will roll out a new
commercial spam filter from ProofPoint, Inc. This filter will
actively quarantine (i.e., not deliver) spam until the local
recipient releases it. Users will receive a single message each day
with a list of the messages waiting for them which appear to be spam.
If they are, indeed, spam, then no action is required and they will
expire from the quarantine and be deleted in two weeks. If a
non-spam message gets quarantined, the user has the option of
releasing the message. Optionally, for those who are wary of spam
filtering technology, there will be a method to place the filter into
a passive mode in which it will not quarantine any of your messages.
If you are interested in trying out this new spam filter before it
goes into production, you are welcome to join our Beta test by
contacting CS Staff and asking to be added.