AustLII...some technical details
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Last updated: Sepetember, 1999
bar: The main AustLII server at www.austlii.edu.au (known internally as "bar") is a Sun Enterprise 4501 server, with two 450 MHz CPUs, 1 Gb main memory and two RAID arrays connected via fibre optic and SCSI interfaces. It is connected to the main router via 100 Mb full duplex link and from there via UTS to the NSW Regional Network.
bondi, bronte, wanda: Two secondary servers (mail.austlii.edu.au aka "bondi" and beta.austlii.edu.au aka "bronte") handle mail, DNS and other services and also act as "workhorses" for document conversion, development and other tasks. They are both single-CPU Sun UltraSPARC 1's with 512 Mb main memory each and about 20 Gb disk space. A third server (a Sun SPARC 4) runs all virtual servers in addition to some public FTP mirrors.
others: A couple of Sun UltraSPARC 5's act as development and testing machines for new software considered too unstable for "beta". These machines, as well as two more Sun SPARC 4's also act as personal workstations. AustLII staff run a mixture of PC (Windows 98, Windows NT, Linux) and Apples (MacOS 8) as personal workstations. An array of Sun IPX's running Redhat Linux at wysh.austlii.edu.au run various software for inferencing work.
the beach thing: almost all AustLII machines are named after Australian beaches (yes, even "bar" and "wineglass"). A tradition from 1996 reflecting where we'd all rather be...
OS: The main servers run Sun's Solaris (a UNIX operating system) however we have begun experimenting with Linux for SPARCs on some hardware. Personal workstations run a mix of Windows, MacOS, Redhat Linux (and once upon a time, OS/2 Warp and BeOS).
security: various network monitoring and control, as well as OS-level software, including SATAN, COPS, Tripwire, ASET, TCP Wrappers. Additional custom software developed here at AustLII.
servers: The main web server is Apache, with numerous modifications including mod_perl, Mason, FastCGI and some modules developed in-house. Mail lists managed with majordomo. Public FTP services handled by NcFTPd. LDAP handled by OpenLDAP.
browsers: Netscape Communicator, MS Internet Explorer, Opera, IBM WebExplorer, Lynx and numerous more "exotic" browsers.
search: Our in-house SINO search software handles all search functionality across the site. Remote indexing managed by Gromit (also developed here). Document management of World Law index handled by Anarchivist (aka "Feathers II").
stuff: We couldn't get by without Perl, (including PerlTK, Mason, mod_perl, LWP, libnet) GNU C/C++, Linux, FreeBSD (and the *BSD family!), OpenLDAP, Berkeley DB, and a host of other freely distributed software.
The following is how this page read in 1996, and is kept for the purposes of historical comparison.
austlii is a SUN SPARCserver 20 with two 50MHz SuperSPARC processors, 64MB of RAM, about 10GB of disk, and 4mm and 8mm tape drives. austlii is the production WWW server for the Australasian Legal Information Institute. It also provides mail, ftp, news and DNS services for AustLII.
arkady is a SUN SPARCstation 5 with 32MB of RAM and 1.5GB of disk. It is the development machine and is used by employees and consultants for prototyping and construction.
fruitcake is a Apple Macintosh Powerbook 520 which is used by the manager for general administrative tasks and as a home and demo machine. It is most commonly found on a PPP link made via a Netcomm M11F modem.
Various other machines are used for AustLII development and production, but the significant machines are listed above.