ExpNet Networking Lab (Brecht/Karstem)

Lab Manager

• Mark Groves

Servers

The principal server with which we have any interaction is rocket, belonging principally to Tim Brecht. It is located in dc3556 in the old PDP-11 rack (the "rocket rack"). It is a fedora system that runs as the centre of the experimental networks the Tim and Martin operate. As of 2007-8-21 it has a cscf-adm userid with sudo permissions. In general we have little to do with the system other than minor advice on Apache configurations, etc. We have provided some hardware support for failed disks, cpus, etc. Important system modification information for rocket is kept in rocket:/root/AdminInfo.txt.

Rocket runs a public-facing web-server on rocket that has an IST-issued Thawte SSL certificate (see below for renewal information). The server is addressed as https://rocket/uwaterloo.ca/usplice. Note that is responds only to https: the http port is blocked at the firewall. The root of the website is at rocket:/var/www/ssl/usplice.

There is an IP-addressable KVM for Tim's systems at expnet-kvm1.cs.

Tim also has a stack of Sun 1U servers that were acquired in conjunction with Peter Buhr. These systems are under warranty until 2008.

Martin Karsten has a full rack of servers in the first row of racks in dc3556 (rack A2). He manages these systems. There is an IP-addressible power bar that is connected to the ExpNet private network (and so not accessible from off campus). Note that the KVM and console tray are not IP addressable.

There are many (many) cabling bundled between Martin's rack and the rocket rack. Once installed, we have nothing to do with them. Generally the bundles are colour-coded into sets of four or five cables, so a bundle might consist of eight sets of four cables (connection each of the four NICs on eight systems).

Overall, it should be noted that there are very few systems or devices that have public network addresses. Rocket has one, as does the IP-KVM. Most other systems are within the private network are are managed by Tim, Martin and their groups.

SSL certificate renewal

It renews in June every year; next due June 2008. Unfortunately the certificate renewal will go to trg@cs because IST wasn't willing to accept a generic contact address. See CSCF ST#58920 for notes on the 2007 renewal.

Vlan 34

Some of Tim's and Martin's servers may still be on vlan 34, which is a hold-over from the old bbcr networks lab. Vlan 34 is owned by ECE so it's a bit of a problem for CSCF staff to work on it (or DNS names allocated thereupon) -- special permissions will be required.

At the time of writing (2007-8-22), there are a couple of vlan34 ports on hpsw55 (ports 33, 36) that terminate in dc3556. ONA shows these to be exgw1.cs and exgw3.cs, both of which show Martin Karsten as the owner. I don't imagine there's any particular reason why these should be on vlan 34 -- they look like candidates to be moved to a CS vlan behind the firewall.

Mailing list

Martin Karsten operates a list nds@lists.uwaterloo.ca; see eDocs://rsg/dd-networks/karsten-mailing-list for details.

Core websites

ExpNet has a website in the CS Core region called "userver". It is addressed as http://userver.uwaterloo.ca and lives in the usual place for vhosts in the Core web-space:

/software/wwwdata_cs.uwaterloo.ca/data/vhosts/cs/userver

There is a pseudo-userid "web-user" in the Core which project members use to modify the contents of the site.