What's Changed on Barney

1. Overview of Changes
2. Reporting Problems
3. Using your ZagNet Account
4. A Comment about Disk Usage
5. Changes to the User Interface
6. Changes to Mail Delivery [Advanced]
7. What's on Barney? What's on Betty?
8. What's Missing [As of August 13th]
9. Features Planned for January 2002

Overview of Changes

There are a significant number of changes this year from last year's Barney. Barney has been split into two systems: Barney and Betty. The old Barney was an older four processor HP 9000 running HPUX 11.00. The new Barney is two-processor Dell running RedHat Linux 7.1 while Betty is a single processor HP 9000 running HPUX 11.00. Betty is essentially there to preserve compatibility with certain applications that we have licensed for HPUX or aren't available on Linux yet.

The new Barney has been upgraded to a whopping 472GB of disk space from the 126GB of disk that was on last year's Barney. Almost 400GB of this disk space is dedicated to student and faculty home directories and e-mail. This allows us to give students 100MB disk space each to store files in their home directories (more by special request). The new server also has significant expansion capabilities; additional CPUs, memory, and disk space can be added as needed.

Another significant change this year is that students can now store documents directly into their Barney home directories from the computer labs. This will go a long ways to eliminate the need to carry floppy disks around. A huge benefit of this is that Barney is backed up nightly. This means that students can feel confident that their files are not only secure, but far less likely to be lost due to a bad floppy disk or hard drive crash. Hopefully this capability will be available from student computers in the residence halls sometime during the 2001-2002 school year.

The following sections will provide more detailed information. Most users can ignore the Advanced areas.

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Reporting Problems

Many changes have been made to Barney so there is a possibility that problems may occur. If you encounter problems that you didn't experience on the old system, PLEASE LET US KNOW. We cannot correct the problem unless we know about it. The best way to report problems is to mail them directly to or mail the Help Desk at helpdesk@gonzaga.edu. You can call the Help Desk at x5550 if you are having problems with e-mail.

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Using your ZagNet Account

Barney used to be a standalone system. When you changed your password on Barney, it only applied to Barney; when you got an account on Barney; that account only resided on Barney. ZagMail and POP/IMAP clients used your Barney account and password because they were authenticating to Barney. The new Barney (and the new Betty) now use your ZagNet Account to login. A ZagNet account is an account that can be used by many different services at Gonzaga to authenticate you as a user. Initially, Barney, Betty and a number of the computer labs will use your ZagNet account to authenticate you. We hope that this account will ultimately be used to authenticate for all of the computer labs, for Blackboard, and for any other electronic service that requires you to login.

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A Comment about Disk Usage

Student disk space allocation has now been increased to 100MB from 40MB per student. This space is for e-mail, web pages, and other files that you put on Barney. We ask that you please respect this "soft" limit. Accounts that use excessive amount of disk space may have their files deleted without notice. The most likely candidates for deletion will be MP3's, movies, and large graphic files. No e-mail messages will be deleted unless they contain excessive large attachments such as MP3's. We will also not delete files that are clearly academic work.

There should be plenty of disk space for everyone. Please don't force me to put disk quotas in place that would prevent students from using Barney as a temporary transfer point for files. If you need additional space for a special project, please e-mail me at and we can make arrangements to increase your allocation.

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Changes to the User Interface

Even though the operating system on Barney has been upgraded to Linux, it is still very similar to HPUX (a version of Unix). As such, there is not a significant change in the commands that are used on Barney. Several of the commands (see "What's Missing" below) are no longer available but a number of new ones are available to replace them.

The two most obvious changes will be with the login process and Pine. The login process has been simplified slightly. The system will now automatically determine what type of telnet program or terminal you are connecting from so you don't have to specify it when you login. On Barney, the backspace pressing requirement has been eliminated altogether; it is still required for Betty, however. The order of the information displayed when you login has been changed to put the most relevant info closest to the bottom of the screen. Pine has been upgraded to the latest version.

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Changes to Mail Delivery [Advanced]

One of the most significant changes to Barney has been with how mail is delivered. The following information is for those users that are more advanced mail filtering with procmail deal with their mailboxes on Barney using a method other that Pine, POP or IMAP.

Inbox location has moved back to /var/mail/username from ~/mail/INBOX

While it was beneficial to locate all of a user's file in their home directory, it created significant problems when backing up the system. We can now run a backup just on the home directories without backing up a user's INBOX at the same time. This will allow us to run more backups on home directories than we could have otherwise.

Procmail is now local delivery agent

The Sendmail configuration uses procmail for mail delivery. Procmail is far more flexible and has better performance than mail. This change was forced by the desire to move user Inboxes to their home directories but provides other benefits as well. For example, if you want to use procmail filters, you just create the .procmailrc file in your home directory and procmail will automatically process it. There is now a global /etc/procmailrc filter that helps eliminate known viruses from incoming e-mail.

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What's on Barney? What's on Betty?

As mentioned previously, Barney is running RedHat Linux 7.1 while Betty is running HPUX 11.00. Many of the commands and programs on the two systems are the same but there are some distinct differences that you may need to be aware of. For most users, it won't really matter which one they telnet into since Pine and other basic programs are on both systems. It's only when you get into web development and specialized applications that you need to go into one system or the other.

Regardless of which system you log into, your files will be available. All of your files are actually stored on Barney but they are also available from Betty using something call NFS shares.

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What's Missing [As of 8/15/01]

Not all applications have been or will be migrated to the new servers. Those that haven't been migrated are listed below along with the status of their migration. The software is listed in priority order.

If there is anything else missing that I'm not aware of, please let me know at . Thanks.

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Features Planned for January 2002

Now that Barney is running on a more powerful system, it is possible to begin providing enhancements to the system that weren't possible before. It is our goal to provide services that students and faculty will find useful. If there are enhancements that you are interested in but aren't listed below, please feel free to pass them along to . While it is our every intention to offer these services by January 2002, it is possible that they will be further delayed depending on implementation issues.

There are some issues with the current version of the software running ZagMail. I hope to have it upgraded sometime this fall to the newer version. There is also a new version on the horizon that adds distributions lists and calendaring to the ZagMail interface. That version may not be available until next year sometime.

Direct Access to Home Directories from Residence Hall Computers

It is possible for students in the residence halls to map their home directories on Barney to a drive letter in same way that it is being done in the computer labs. We hope to make this available to students by the beginning of Spring semester but that is dependent on potential licensing issues and the performance impact it has on Barney. If the performance impact is significant, it will require waiting until Fall 2002 after a processor and memory upgrade is completed on the new Barney.

Standard CGI Scripts for Web Page Development

While there a currently a few CGI scripts available for general use in web page development on Barney, they are poorly documented. There are also many other CGI scripts that would be beneficial to users but are currently installed on Barney. It is our goal to collect useful CGI scripts, document them, and make them available for anyone to use in their home pages on Barney. We're also hoping to develop better documentation for web page creation in general with specific implementation assistance on Barney.

Other Projects

Is there something that you want on Barney (or the computer labs) that currently isn't available? We have our ideas on what would be beneficial but we would like your input if you have suggestions. Just send any comments to and we'll consider it for implementation.

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