Hi,
I take Martin's point for the positive implications of a multiple server
environment.
Slightly off point, is there a search engine/portal (shudder)
dedicated to content based solely on UK Universities...?
Regards,
Nick.
------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 14:45:58 +0100
Subject: Re: Nos. of Web servers in UK HEIs
From: Martin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Send reply to: Martin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>
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"Jeremy M. Harmer" writes:
| I am interested to know what policies others have on this, and on the
| attachment of systems to your networks generally (as many of these may
| become web servers, either knowingly or not, depending on what s/w people
| install!)
Hi - see <URL:http://www.lboro.ac.uk/computing/info/policies/> for
ours. We don't have anything specific about running application level
servers (HTTP, FTP, ...) except for on our student halls network. As
an aside, I must confess to some surprise that there are sites that
have policy documents which aren't publicly accessible. Hmm!
| We have 606 by the way, including switches, printers, servers with both
| port 80 and 443 etc. and not all are accessible from outside.
Tarnation, beaten already :-) SSL on port 443 only gets us an extra
39, so we're well and truly in the doghouse... ! As with Leeds, some
of these are firewalled too - e.g. we have a separate LAN for admin
access to our core ATM switches and edge devices, which I've
firewalled against off-campus access.
BTW there may be sound technical arguments for running lots of
websites, e.g. let's say that my research project wants to build a Web
based "demonstrator" (something a lot of research projects want to do)
using some technology which isn't supported on the main Web server -
e.g. in our case MySQL and PHP or ASP would be good examples. Bzzt!
Thanks for playing :-)
Another good one is people with large datasets - e.g. our central Web
server has (wait for it!) 9GB of mirrored disk, with a whole 100MB
free at the moment. This is quality Sun hardware, mind - no nipping
down to the shops and getting a 30GB disk for 200 quid for us! Not
that we'd necessarily want to, of course. What's suitable for a
research project with a handful of users mayn't be appropriate for a
24x7 service that has 17,000 users.
What's more, since we're in the midst of a budget freeze on support
services, it's proving very difficult to get money out of the
University - even for replacing hardware that's way past its use-by
date. It has to actually (or almost) go under before the message gets
across. I'm told this is a common situation across HE at the moment.
Picking up on Brian's <thought> bubble, it would be useful to have a
simple way for sites to list their public servers - or for servers to
describe themselves to search engines/robots/... Back in prehistoric
times there was some interest in using IAFA templates in a well-known
location (/site.idx) for this. I'm not aware of anything that's being
used seriously in this role nowadays, though obviously there's
potential for the likes of XML and RDF. Am I just behind the times,
though, and missing out on something obvious? RSS would seem to be a
possibility? (cue Dan!) Opportunity for the UK to take the lead?
Re the numbers game - Brian's paper is called "How many web servers
are there in the UK Higher Education community?", and does feature a
"top 5" site list. Now, if it was called "How many web servers do
Netcraft think are in UK HE" I wouldn't have a problem with it, but
the title and the content are quite misleading - even after the
disclaimers are taken into account. It's a bit like league tables of
Universities... ;-)
Cheers,
Martin
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-----------------------------------
Nick Marshall
Website Development Officer,
http://www.sci-eng.mmu.ac.uk/
Faculty of Science and Engineering,
Manchester Metropolitan University.
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