henry@MIT.EDU (Henry Mensch) (06/07/90)
In article <371@usenix.ORG> sonya@usenix.UUCP (Sonya Neufer) writes: | |The terminal room will have a Sun 3/80 with QIC 11, QIC 24 and a |9-track tape drive. Facilities will be available to make QIC 11, |QIC 24 and Exabyte tapes from AnDATAco's booth on the show floor |as well. | |It is possible the Terminal Room will have Exabyte and TK50 facilities |as well. I will bring the single tape that MIT Project Athena just began to distribute recently to the terminal room for distribution by the tape copy facility described above. A description of the software (in particular, the top-level README from that tape) is appended below. REFERENCE: Welcome to the Project Athena Network Services Software (PANSS) tape. This tape contains many of the applications and network services software in daily use at MIT's Project Athena; this software makes it easy to manage and use a large workstation environment. All the software and documentation on this tape is covered by the MIT Copyright, except where otherwise noted. Exact, complete copyright notices are included in the software; the notice below gives the reader some idea of the content of the MIT copyright notice. PERMISSION to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of M.I.T. not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission. M.I.T. makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty. Some of the software on this tape is not necessarily commercial quality, and may require some sweat-equity (i.e., work) to operate in your environment. We know this software works under 4.3 BSD on IBM RT/PCs and on various Digital Equipment Corporation VAX architectures, and with ULTRIX 3.1 on VAX architectures; work is in progress to bring some of these services to a variety of other platforms, including some common PC software platforms. This software will ultimately become available on future editions of the PANSS tape, and the organization of software will likely change for the next edition of the tape. Future editions of the PANSS tape will be announced on the USENET, on various large Internet mailing lists, and on the info-panss mailing list (to be added to this list; please send e-mail to info-panss-request@MIT.EDU). Please don't call Project Athena or the MIT Technology Licensing Office with queries about the content and schedule of future tapes; the time spent answering those queries can be better used producing software for the next tape. We presume that the person(s) attempting to install this software are experienced UNIX systems programmers, and already have some knowledge about the Athena model of workstation computing and the particular network services (presumably from reading the appropriate papers presented at USENIX conferences). What follows is a brief description of the software included on this tape; a more detailed description of all the Athena software (some of which is not included on this tape, but may be included on future tapes) is attached. There are five top-level directories on the tape: applications, documents, libraries, sendmail-cfs, and services. There is also a README file at the top level which contains this text. The services directory contains the source for the basic Athena network services: Hesiod, Kerberos, Moira, and Zephyr, as well as the Remote Virtual Disk (RVD) system developed at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. 7 Kerberos: If your tape was delivered to an address outside the United States of America, the kerberos source is actually a modified version of the Kerberos authentication system. All calls to the DES library have been removed in the export version of Kerberos, and thus the export version of Kerberos will not be useful as supplied. This software can be made useful by adding the DES calls to the appropriate parts of the source; while this is a non-trivial task, it isn't an impossible task, and a skilled UNIX Systems Programmer should be able to do this work in short order (provided, of course, that this programmer understands how Kerberos works as described in the documentation and the Usenix paper). Neither MIT nor Project Athena are able to assist in this work. 7 Zephyr and Moira require that Kerberos be installed, since these services use Kerberos-style authentication in their work. 7 Hesiod does not require Kerberos for operation, but (particularly for large environments) it may be useful to use Moira to manipulate the Hesiod database. The sendmail-cfs directory contains sendmail configuration files for a workstation client and a mailhub; these are known to work with sendmail release 5.59 and later. The libraries directory on this tape is empty, save for a README file which explains this fact. The libraries which will appear in this space in the future actually live elsewhere on the tape; unfortunately, as software development efforts progressed, different versions of some locally-created libraries came to be used by different services and applications. We hope to have this fixed for the next version of this tape. The documents directory contains just that: documents. In particular, it contains documents which we distribute on our anonymous FTP server. Right now, this directory only contains documents which describe the Palladium print system. The software to accompany this documentation may appear on a future edition of this tape. The applications directory contains several applications which we created or modified for use in a large workstation environment. 7 track is an application which originated at Bellcore. It provides a convenient way to maintain system software on client workstations. 7 mh.6.6 contains the source for the Rand Mail Handler system. Some of its applications have been modified to use the Post Office Protocol; some of those POP applications have been further modified to use Kerberos as the means of authentication. 7 gms is the Global Message System, which we use to provide message-of-the-day (motd) service in the workstation environment. gms uses the Hesiod and Zephyr services. 7 gdb provides the means to access a relational database over the network. This particular version of gdb expects the database on the server side to be an RTI Ingres database; if your database is of another type, you will have to modify gdb accordingly. 7 discuss is a distributed electronic conferencing system that allows users to communicate in a set of electronic "meetings". In short, discuss provides public and private meetings, where transactions (messages) are stored indefinitely. discuss uses a client/server model of networking; clients contact servers over TCP/IP streams to access individual meetings. To authenticate users over the network, discuss uses the Kerberos authentication system; in the single machine case, discuss does not rely on Kerberos. 7 delete is the set of programs written to solve the problem of retrieving accidentally-deleted files. The most current versions of all Project Athena software are always available on our anonymous FTP server; this service is only available if you are directly connected to the Internet with the TCP/IP protocol suite (please don't call to ask that we send you tape copies of the latest version of something; we are unable to comply with such requests). A one-page handout which describes this process will accompany this document. We are interested to hear about your experiences with the software on this tape; if you want to submit a bug report, use the e-mail address provided with the specific network service. If you can't find what looks like a reasonable address in the documentation of the particular network service, you may report bugs by sending e-mail to bug-panss@MIT.EDU. Please keep in mind that we are not a software house, and don't have a large staff dedicated to supporting off-site users; we will be glad to provide whatever assistance we can, but cannot promise much in the way of support for this software. Written comments may be sent via postal mail to: Henry Mensch MIT Project Athena External Relations Group E40-379 MIT One Amherst Street CAMBRIDGE, MA 02139 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA -- henry mensch / <henry@mit.edu> -- project athena external relations