Physics Computer network

Computer Network

The computer facilty at the Physics Department is inspired by the Open Source Software Movement, currently sweeping the world. The facility consists of a state-of-the-art network of Pentium-4 and Pentium III machines, Apple Macintosh Power PCs and a DEC Alpha workstation. The network runs on the robust operating system Linux. It has all the features of an advanced network, namely, NFS, NIS, Intranet, Time Synchronization and many more. The network also seamlessly integrates PCs running Linux or Windows in individual offices.

The printing facility includes two laser printers for publication quality print-outs, and a dot-matrix printer for printing program code and emails, kept in the computer lab. In addition, the computing research lab has three laser printers.

For Web browsing, the Department uses Jamia's fast leased-line connection.

For the heavy computation needs of the Department a Parallel Computer consisting of eight high-end Pentium machines is functional. This provides several gigaFlops of computing power to the Department.

Facilities available over the network

E-mail/Internet
- The Department uses a private domain jamia-physics.net for email. The email traffic is fast and uninterrupted, and is managed by Flamingo which also acts as the SMTP, POP and IMAP mail-server for the Department. User can also check their email through a web interface.
- Web browsing is available on all the machines through browsers Mozilla and Opera. And an instant messenger program, Gaim, allows users to use their Yahoo!/MSN accounts to chat.
- All M.Sc. and Ph.D. students are given personal email accounts when they join.
Programming languages
- Fortran, C, Pascal and Java compilers are available over the network. All these compilers run on Linux, and are thus free, and can be used by as many users as one wants, at the same time.
- The symbolic computation package Mathematica is installed on one machine, and can be used across the network.
Word processing and Office tools
- All the office work in the Department, including admission related work, is done on Linux using the Open Office package available on all the machines in the computer lab.
- For writing research papers, the TEX/L^ATEX typesetting software, commonly used in the physics community, is available on all machines.
The Computer lab has several copies of a comprehensive Users' Guide to make it easy for new users to efficiently use all the facilities available.

Topology of the Department network

Most of the computers in both the buildings are part of the network.
All the machines on the network have a name by which they are recognized. The machines are named after birds.
The machine peacock is the server, and is the nerve center of the network. It runs Linux operating system.
Other machines can be booted in either Linux orWindows. Some of these are koel, seagull, bulbul, barbet, egret, heron, hoopoe, cuckoo, robin and drongo.
Look at the map of the network to get a better idea.

Unix Networking

Peacock has been set up to be an NIS (Network Information Service) server, so that the users have a single account which works on all the machines.
Peacock is also set up as an NFS (Network File System) server, so that most application software and user directories reside only on the server and are served to the clients through the NFS protocol. Thus, the users have the same set of files in all the machines.
Fortran, C, Pascal and Java compilers are available over the network, as also the TeX typesetting software, which is commonly used in the physics community. Apart from this, a wide variety of packages for plotting, symbolic calculation, wordprocessing, drawing, web-designing, image manipulation are available over the network.
Flamingo acts as the SMTP, POP and IMAP mail-server for the department.

Windows Networking

On the Linux Server the free software Samba has been installed and configured, which makes the Linux machine act as a Windows NT server. The other machines, while booted in Windows, are configured for Windows NT networking and can transparently talk to the Linux Server.

The Department Intranet

Flamingo also acts as an Intranet Web-server through the popular web-server software Apache. Other machines can access this server using both Linux and Windows based web-browsers. The Webserver presently has some guides for learning Unix, internet, LaTeX and web-designing, and some useful data like the Physics and Astrophysics Classification Scheme (PACS) index. It also carries a directory of addresses of people of the department. It also has some educational Java applets for online learning.

Flamingo as the Firewall

The Department LAN has been uplinked to the Jamia LAN. This allows seamless integration of the Department LAN with the Campus network.
Flamingo is configured to act as an internet gateway and firewall for the entire network. This has been done using the IP-masquerading facility in Linux. This allows all the machines on the network to access the internet at the same time, through a single internet connection.
Flamingo also acts as an internet proxy server using the proxy server software Squid. This makes the internet access from the network faster by storing frequently accessed pages in a cache.