The Calar Alto Computer News for 2001

(Period from January to December 2001)

(A) Hardware:

- New router installed. Our old Cisco 2501 has been replaced by a much newer Cisco 3640. On the router we have four 2Mb. serial ports that allow a maximum of 8Mb of bandwidth and a ISDN port. Also a special four 2Mb. serial port card has been installed on the CICA's router (Cisco 7500) at the Almería's University for the connection with our router.

- Upgrade of our external Internet link from 2Mb to 8Mb. Since march our connection to the University of Almería (our normal way out to Internet) has a bandwidth of 8Mb trough our new router. Now our Microwave Link to the University is working at 100% of its capacity.

- New network at the CAHA Almería's office has been set up. Again, since march, our office at Almería has a network between all the computers running there. Also a Cisco 801 router has been installed there to allow a permanent ISDN connection to our network at CAHA. Office's network has been prepared as a VPN (Virtual Private Network).

- Almería Office Network (see above) has now a Windows 2000 Server giving DHCP services.

- New General Use Computer has been installed. It is called 'ca5' and it is a nice SUN Ultra80 with two processor and 1 Gb. of main memory. It has 280 Gb of disk space.

- 3 more X-Terminals: one for the library, one for 1.23m. Tel. and one more for our Astronomy group

- ca2 and ca4 are now used as x-terminals by our Astronomy group. Both machines are no longer used as general logging machines.

- ca6 is also used as an X-Terminal but for General Use (it is a Sun 5 machine). It is located on the Computer Room at the laboratory.

- New Main Server Computer (cassy) has been installed. It is a Sun Ultra 10 Station. New Operating system is Solaris 8.

- New computer for serving Calar Alto Web Pages (webserv). It is a Sun Ultra 1 Station running Solaris 8 (64 Bits).

- Two more modems (56Kbps) are working for our RAS access. And a new one coming soon.

 

 (B) Software:

- FFL : A software for controlling Flat Field Lamps. It was done together with Electronic Group's Mitsubishi Programable Controller.

- New Weather Web Page with graphics showing the latest 12 hours of tendency. It has also wind graphics. The Seeing data (obtainded from the DIMM camera) can be consulted on the same page. Improved perfomance on Statistics as well as wind statistical data has been included. Finally the page behaves differently if you call it from Calar Alto Network or if you call it from outside, just to be faster if calling from a slow connection.

- New Computer Department Web Page, with links that allow you to see the traffic load on both the external and internal network with graphics for day, week, month and year.

- A lot of security jobs including filtering on our router and several patch installation on Solaris machines.

- Temperature measurements at the 3.5 at differents points. See here the web page.

 

- Reflection and Scattering Data Base Measurements. You can see now all data taken by Mr. Frahm on this Data Base.

- Some computers have been updated to Solaris 8. They are ultra1, ultra2, ultra3, ca1, ca5, webserv and the main server cassy. Rest of  machines are running Solaris  7 with all security patches installed.

- A proxy server is now working for external web pages. It is also a cache server.

- Our web server daemon (httpd) has been updated to Apache 1.3.9 version, and compiled together with zlib, libpng, gd, jpeg libraries and also with PHP.

- Ftp area is increased up to 30 Gb.


 

CAHA COMPUTER GROUP (December 2001)

Ernst Schachtebeck (+34 950 632 505)

Ricardo Hernández (+34 950 632 533)

Enrique de Guindos (+34 950 632 517)