Software

From Wiki CEINGE

A number of programs are installed on the various servers and are used to build and integrate the IT services. They are installed, configured and regularly updated to guarantee a reliable service to the final user.

Here follows a short description of them:

Apache WebServer

It is a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services. It is used to support a wide range of web applications, used for research activities and delivery of bioinformatics applications.

BigBrother

Big Brother monitors System and Network-delivered services for availability. When problems are detected, the system manager is immediately notified by e-mail, pager, or text messaging.

BigSister

Big Sister is an alternative to the big brother software as system and network monitor and provides improved characteristics, like graphical statistics of the history, through RRDTools graphic library.

ClamAV antivirus

Clam AntiVirus is an anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a flexible and scalable antivirus scanner and an advanced tool for automatic virus database updating via Internet, allowing constant protection against new viruses.

Condor

It is used in clustered computers, where different and etherogeneous computing nodes collaborate by network to resolve high performance computing tasks, requiring long execution time. The goal of the Condor® Project is to develop, implement, deploy, and evaluate mechanisms and policies that support High Throughput Computing (HTC) on large collections of distributively owned computing resources.

DHCP (Automatic IP assignment)

This service provides IP addresses for users that have registered their own laptop and want access the network. There are several private networks designed for this purpose, associated to different areas of the institute.

Fileserver

A central disk space used by users to

• store
• share files by network

the access is guaranteed using different standard protocols:

• afp (netatalk)
• ftp (proftp)
• windows file sharing (samba).

FJS (Fast Job Scheduling system)

It is a software to interactively schedule computing power on a distributed computer; it is written in a high level programming language (PHP) and is based on a relation database server (mysql) to store status information of the computing nodes; it also provides a web interface to monitor the load distribution.

IMP Webmail

A web interface to access the mail server, using the IMAP protocol, that allows the users to have instant access to its mailbox without any mail client configuration.

LDAP user management

It is a directory service, providing accounting information; it is used for authentication from all the central services with restricted access requiring the ceinge users to own a unique username and password. Its distributed architecture in the form of one master replicated to multiple slaves, guarantee performances and reliability of the service.

MySQL DB server

It is an opensource relational DB server reaching fast performances, high reliability and good usability to manage a high volume of data. It is also very popular for its frequent use in applications built on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python).

PostgreSQL DB server

It is a relational DB server providing reliability, data integrity and correctness and integrating full support for ACID rules, for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages).

Red Hat Diskless Environment

Some networks require multiple computers with the same operating system and the same configuration. They also require that these systems be easy to reboot, upgrade, and manage. One solution is to use a diskless environment in which most of the operating system is shared from a central server between the clients. Each time the client boots, it mounts most of the OS from the server and its own configuration from its (remote) specific snapshot.

RRDTools

A graphic library to display statistic data, often used as support software from other software packages.

Rsync

Copies files between machines, using different network protocols as transport, such as secure shell (ssh).

Sendmail mailserver

Provide a stable and efficient way to send outgoing emails and to deliver emails to local mailboxes for registered users; its capabilities to load external software as plugin, allows a certain flexibility to extend the sendmail functionalities, like antivirus server, online blacklist checker, antispam system and so on.

SpamAssassin antispam

SpamAssassin is a mature, widely-deployed open source project that serves as a mail filter to identify Spam. SpamAssassin uses a variety of mechanisms including header and text analysis, Bayesian filtering, DNS blocklists, and collaborative filtering databases. SpamAssassin runs on a server, and filters spam before it reaches your mailbox.

VNC

Provides access to a remote graphical linux desktop, running the VNC server and requires a VNC client to connect and display the server desktop; it is used to deploy the VLS service available to ceinge users to run the scientific applications that requires a Unix OS as platform.

Webmin

Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any browser that supports tables and forms (and Java for the File Manager module), it is possible setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and almost all management task of a computer. Webmin consists of a simple web server, and a number of CGI programs which directly update system files like /etc/inetd.conf and /etc/passwd. The web server and all CGI programs are written in Perl version 5, and use no non-standard Perl modules.