Computer services provided by the department guarantee basic authentication, email, WEB, backup and file sharing services. All these services are guaranteed for Linux, Windows and for MacOS X architectures.
Research computing facilities include a rough fifteen Linux based servers, providing WEB services, Email, home backup and, of course, authentication. A Telesyn RAPIER G6LX device provides level 3 network connectivity with SeRRA, and, as a consequence, with the Internet. A Telesyn AT9816GB provides internal level 2 network connectivity. A wireless network is available covering all the Department rooms and guaranteeing access to full Department services to Department members as well as to WEB services only to Department visitors.
At the moment, all the machines providing resources and/or services to the department researchers use Intel or AMD processors. Internal connectivity is guaranteed by a single Fast Ethernet network (131.114.2.0/23), hosting the servers, researcher private machines, printers, etc. A completely separated, fire-walled network hosts administrative office computers. The RAPIER device also behaves as a firewall with respect to the external world. Free access from inside the research network to the outside (Internet) world is guaranteed to researchers while accesses from outside are usually prohibited, but the standard ones (http, ssh, and the alike). A large number of personal machines (more than 200) are deployed in the different offices and laboratories: currently, about are third of the machines run Linux (different flavors), are third run Windows (NT, 2000, 98, XP), and one third are either Macs or dual boot machines used both with Windows and with Linux. There are also a consistent number of portables that usually operate in dual boot mode and interconnect to internal LAN through department DHCP service. Seven network printers, accessible from all operating systems, provide high-quality laser printing facilities. A network scanner provides handy ways of delivering faxes as well as a fast way to acquire PDF versions of printed documents and to send them directly to the user mailbox. Other available equipment includes CD masterizers and digital cameras.
Most of the research groups in the Department also operate their own servers, running different kind of services (high performance clusters, including a 50 nodes, Pentium based blade cluster, database machines, WEB servers of different flavors, etc.). Last but not least, both data from administrative section and from teaching secretary are automatically made available at the department WEB site, supporting both research activity and teaching related activities.
Recently, the Department has got some extraordinary funds to improve the computer infrastructure and most of the key servers and equipments are going to be updated with the aim of providing high availability, ``always on'' computer services.
The teaching related facilities include about 20 servers both for general services, such as e-mail, and for specific services required by specific classes, such as three Oracle database servers required by the database class. These computing facilities include two Linux boxes which we use as packet-filtering routers, and web and news caching proxies. Most of the servers are Intel-based machines; 3 of them are running Windows 2000 for various Windows-based services, while 12 are running Fedora Core Linux. Notably, there is one Linux-based (equipped with a hardware MegaRAID array) and one Windows-based file server. Disk quotas allocated to individual students depend basically on the programs they follow and projects they are involved into; this ranges from a minimum of 5Mb to several hundred Mbs of space for individual home directory. Both Windows-based and Linux-based disk spaces are available to students on clients running either operating system. There is also a Dump Server with 480 GB of disk space (arranged in a software-based RAID5 array) which runs nightly disk-based dumps of all data. Furthermore, the department provides a dial-up service for students by means of a Cisco 2500 terminal server and 16 modems. Teaching computing facilities support two operating systems on client machines: Microsoft Windows XP and Linux (recently migrated to Debian after a previous long RedHat experience). Most of the clients are Intel-based architectures: presently most of them are dual-boot machines of Pentium IV class, while of the older machines two thirds boot only with Linux and the remaining only with Windows. Older machines are constantly in the process of being dismissed, however. Some Apple Mac OS/X clients has been set up, thus completing the client suite in such a way it covers the more common operating systems and architectures.
Web services provided by both the research and the teaching computing facilities include: home pages for teachers and students, home pages of the different research/teaching projects hosted at the department, internal bulletin boards and laboratory monitoring services, web access to teacher's and researcher's email, technical report repository, etc. (for more details, see http://www.di.unipi.it/ and http://www.cli.di.unipi.it/).