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Server differences

We have moved users from michelob and dark to the newer budlight and will turn off the aging michelob and failed dark servers. Newer hardware and software might be installed later to replace michelob and/or dark, but they will not be the main servers for user activities, only for experimentation by users.

General environment and configuration differences between systems.

  • The default language on budlight is the case-insensitive "en_US", which affects sorting, directory listings, pattern matching, and many other text related operations. On michelob and dark, the default language is the traditional case-sensitive English. To continue to use the traditional language, change language related environment variables to "C". Examples of variables to change are LANG and LANGUAGE.
  • User home directories are shared between michelob and dark, but budlight is separate and does not share home directories with any other system.
  • On michelob, users can do their own restores from the latest backup by looking in /backup01/homecopy1/$ID, which is a copy of the home directory. Due to space limitations, no backups are kept on dark.

Backups and restore on budlight are TBD.

  • The ncurses package is not installed on dark, and the one on michelob is old. Support for color terminals is limited, but one TERM you can try is "aixterm".
  • X client applications are not installed on budlight.

Most commands will have different versions, support libraries, default options, etc. between systems. Most will not affect how they are used, but some will.

  • The commands, man pages, configuration files, etc. will be in different locations. If they are available for general use, the directories should all be in $PATH or $MANPATH, so this should be transparent. Programs and man pages installed in /opt usually have a symbolic link from the corresponding directory in /usr or /usr/local.
    • Executables might be in /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt/_/bin, etc. * Man pages might be in /usr/man, /usr/local/man, /opt/_/man, etc.
    • Configuration files might be in /etc, /usr/local/etc, /etc/opt/___, etc.

Known commands where the difference between systems is important. This is not a comprehensive list, only the highlights.

  • lynx is constantly getting new features in each release.
    • Michelob is the oldest with 2.8.3rel.1. It doesn't support SSL (https) or bzip2.
    • Dark is currently the newest with 2.8.7dev.7. It supports SSL (https) and bzip2.
    • Budlight has 2.8.7dev4-1. It supports SSL (https) and bzip2.
    • The system-wide lynx.cfg on michelob and dark have several settings customized to our environment or to make lynx more usable. No customization has been done on budlight. Some of the customization is:
      • The Index (i) command points at Google since the default URL pointed to a dead web site.
      • The default NNTP server was set to "news.wustl.edu".
      • Using memory caching and changing some display formats.
  • ksh (Korn Shell):
    • Budlight is using the 1993 version of ksh. Michelob and dark are using the 1988 version.
  • mail:
    • The standard "mail" command is available on budlight, but can't be used to read mail in your inbox because budlight uses the Maildir format for inboxes, and "mail" doesn't understand that format. Also, mail inboxes will probably not stored on budlight anyway, and you will have to use a mail client that supports POP or IMAP access to retrieve your mail from the inbox on bud. Mail clients that can be used include mutt, pine, and fetchmail.
    • Incoming mail will not be stored in an inbox on budlight. To retrieve, you will have to use POP or IMAP to access your inbox on bud. See details in the mail_setup page.
  • mutt:
    • While installed for transition, mutt on dark and michelob is missing some features. In addition to reading mail, you can use mutt to send mail or manipulate mailboxes in your home directory. For more details on using mutt, see the dedicated mutt page.
      • On dark, mutt doesn't support secure connections using SSL.
      • On michelob and dark, mutt doesn't support header cache.
  • vi editor:
    • Michelob and dark use the traditional "vi" package, while budlight uses the newer "vim" package.
      • Some commands in your .exrc might not work with vim.
      • Advanced features ov "vim" will not be available with "vi".
    • The default editor on Linux systems, such as budlight, appears to be "nano" instead of "vi", so other commands that invoke the editor will probably invoke the wrong one if you normally use vi. The solution modify your shell's profile script, such as ".profile" to set the EDITOR variable to vi, for example, "EDITOR=vi".
  • ssh:
    • The SSH and SCP on michelob are very old, so some newer features are not available.
    • The SSH on dark has a bug that prevents correct operation of PuTTY's sftp client, psftp. Dark's ssh works fine with other sftp clients, and PuTTY's psftp client works fine with other ssh servers. PuTTY's pscp client works with dark.

Known commands that are not on all the systems.

  • md5sum is not installed on dark.
  • wget is not installed on dark.
  • pine is not installed on dark.
  • whois is only installed on dark.
  • slrn, tin, and trn are only installed on michelob.
  • elm is only installed on michelob.
  • The Apache web server is not installed on michelob.
  • sendmail is not installed on budlight, it has postfix instead.
  • procmail is not installed on budlight.
  • There are spamd daemons on michelob and dark, but not budlight. This is for use of the spamc command instead of the spamassassin command for faster performance when scanning for spam.
server_diffs.txt · Last modified: 2008/02/25 16:47 by 4.245.75.44