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The ADN Connection, March/April 1995 The A3C Connection
March/April 1995 Contents Multimedia is Here! The Web on CMS (and other news) Multimedia from Your Desktop The Multimedia Alphabet Soup Outfitting a Multimedia Workstation
In the ELCs Using the InfoTech Arcade A Low-Cost Approach to Do-It-Yourself Multimedia Courseware Development Developing Instructional Multimedia -- A Realistic Look Multimedia -- Fact and Fantasy About the ADN Connection

The Web on CMS (and other news)

 
The Campus Beat
Everyone
 
   
 
     
Performance Problems on CMS (and some solutions)
  It's no secret to anyone who has used the UICVM system this semester that we've had some serious problems with its performance, mainly caused by the increased use of electronic communication.
  • Several key BITNET "hub" nodes dropped out or cut back on the traffic they will handle. Along with the exponential growth in Listserv mail, this has caused UICVM (also a hub) to handle ever increasing traffic.
  • More people than ever are using UICVM, mostly to read email and Netnews. For example, on one day recently, over 5700 people used UICVM at least once.
  • The success of ADN-ii (and the continuing demise of ADN-i) has increased telnet sessions to UICVM, stressing the capacity of the "front-end" devices that connect UICVM to ADN-ii.
We've taken steps to relieve these problems:
  • We moved much of the UICVM BITNET load to our new "baby VM" machines -- large PCs that have special VM/CMS coprocessors.
  • We purchased a used, smaller IBM mainframe, and moved the NOTIS library database and some other Library services to it. (Our "toddler VM")
  • We're moving much of the Netnews. server/database from CMS to a UNIX machine. Except for the "alt." groups, you will still be able to read news from UICVM. (The alt. groups will be available on UNIX.)
  • We're purchasing licenses to run LISTSERV products on our UNIX platforms, shifting it away from CMS.
  • We upgraded the UICVM telnet front-end device from a 386 PC to a Pentium. We are also looking into a test evaluation of a new product that eliminates the need for the front-end entirely.
And of course, there's tigger, and the new student UNIX machine, icarus. We expect several hundred students to move their base of operation from UICVM to icarus.

You can help us, too. If you are one of the many people who use UICVM mainly for reading email or browsing Netnews., then you might want to investigate using Eudora and Trumpet, the graphical email and news clients for PCs and Macs. Or open your UNIX account and try pine for your email and tin for news.

 
     
The Web Comes to CMS
  To all you diehard CMSers tantalized by descriptions of the World Wide Web, but frustrated by your lack of access to it -- Charlotte has arrived! On CMS, just type www and Charlotte will give you a taste of what the excitement is all about. (For those childless people wondering what "Charlotte" means, she's the title spider in the children's book Charlotte's Web.) Charlotte the software is a Web browser for CMS, written by Carl Forde from British Colombia Systems Corporation. Carl has done as good a job as one can do, given the limitations of CMS.

When using Charlotte, to jump to the next page in Webspace, move your cursor to a highlighted phrase and press <enter>. A table at the bottom of the screen lists the current actions of the CMS function keys. You can use them to download files, view HTML source, specify a URL to jump to. In fact, Charlotte has more actions than there are function keys to execute them; press F9 to toggle to an alternate set of function key actions.

Because CMS doesn't support graphics easily, Charlotte is text-only. That means you won't get the full visual impact of the Web. If you have access to Mosaic or Netscape (perhaps in the Computer Center public labs, from PCs or Macs with ADN-ii connections, or through SLIP connections from home), you will prefer them to Charlotte. But most of the real information on the Web is in the text, and Charlotte does handle text well. (Another current limitation is that Charlotte does not support forms, so you can't fill out information and send it back to a server.)

Like other Web browsers, Charlotte can connect to Gopher servers, so now there isn't any good reason to prefer the Gopher client on CMS over Charlotte, since Charlotte does HTTP, FTP, and telnet as well as gopher. In fact, there's beginning to be information about UIC that's on the Web and not in Gopher. (We are keeping the UIC Gopher server, though, for a long while, to allow our information providers time to convert to HTML. Us, too!)

 
     
Icarus is Born (and Do-It-Yourself Account Creation for Icarus, Tigger and CMS)
  Icarus, our much-anticipated Sparcserver 1000 for students, was born March 6. (Well, at least it was made publicly available on that date.) And with it, we have a new procedure for creating computer accounts on UICVM, tigger, and icarus, for both faculty/staff and for students. In many cases, the procedure is fully automatic; you can open your own account just by clicking a mouse and answering a few questions.

Want to open your UNIX (or CMS) account? Either:

  • click on the Account icon on a public Windows PC
  • point your gopher client to gopher.uic.edu and select The Computer --> ADN Account Creation
  • browse on the Web to http://www.uic.edu/depts/ACCC/ and select Accounts --> Get an Account
You will be asked to enter your social security number, the "chip code" number from the back of your UIC photo id, your birthdate, and the name of the machine on which you want an account, icarus for students only, tigger for faculty/staff only, and UICVM for everyone. If the information you enter matches what we think we know about you, voila! you have your account. (Do you want email sent to your netid at uic.edu to be delivered to your new account? Faculty and staff can see their phonebook contact person to have that done, or anyone with an ADN UNIX account can select their own. Just log into your UNIX account and enter

pbupdate

Then follow the instructions.)

Of course, you can still have an account if our information about you is wrong or incomplete, or if you already have multiple accounts on a single machine. We'll just need to get our records in order and we need your help to do it, so please go to the CSO to straighten things out.

We have a variety of software on icarus. We hope it will be an enjoyable platform for email, news, Web surfing, and even some serious work. As on tigger, enter softlist for a list of available software. Or use our ADN Web Home Page to find the software lists, including software on the machines in the public labs.

We intend to build as many functions as possible on icarus, so that no one will use a CMS account unless they actually like it. We have also added free seminars on basic UNIX, the vi editor, and the Pine mail system to our calendar. The seminar dates are in INFORM, Gopher, and the Web; seminar brochures are available from the CSO.

Please send comments or suggestions to consult@uic.edu.

 
     
Stake Your Claim in WebSpace
  Tired of simply Web surfing, and ready to publish? Students are welcome to publish personal home pages on icarus, and faculty or staff may do so on tigger. Follow the instructions on the ADN Home Page (or see the September/October issue of The ADN Connection). All you need to do is put your HTML files in your ~/public_html directory and make them (and the directory) world readable. We'll even provide disk space for departments or other official UIC organizations. (Check out Campus Organization on the UIC home page for a growing collection of departmental and campus unit pages.)

Yes, we have talked about this before...

See the September/October issue of The ADN Connection for a fuller discussion of WWW, HTML, HTTP, URL, and other parts of the Web alphabet soup, including a brief guide to setting up your own WWW home page. Back articles of The ADN Connection are available online, naturally, through WWW. Use this URL: http://www.uic.eduhttp://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/newsletter/ (all together, of course, without spaces).

 
     
Visit Us at the ADN Home Page
  Speaking of information now available on the WWW but not Gopher, fire up Charlotte or your favorite Web browser and visit the ADN Home Page. It's listed on the UIC Home Page, under The Computer, or go directly to it at the URL: http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/. You'll find out about our services, possibly some you didn't know existed. Peruse our documentation, open your UNIX account on tigger or icarus, or learn about ways to use computers in your classes. We're continuing to work on our home page; suggestions are certainly welcome.  
     
Follow the Details at the ADN
  Perhaps you're familiar with Bulletin, the Computer Center's repository for urgent and timely news flashes? (It's on INFORM, Gopher, and the Web.) But what about news which is no less timely, but considerably less urgent? Like announcements that a version of existing software is ready for testing, that we've made a minor change to a UNIX system that shouldn't effect anyone (but sometimes does), that we've added new software or removed something old? Now these announcements have a home, on the new ADN home page. At the top of the ADN WWW home page, select What's new at the ADN.  
     
Netids and Email Delivery
  Our readers know that faculty and staff may choose a netid (up to eight characters) to use as a machine-independent mail address, and also as a login id for tigger. Students are assigned their netids, but they are used in the same way: as login ids for their icarus accounts and as email addresses. My netid is bobg, and I can have mail which comes addressed to bobg@uic.edu forwarded to wherever I want. (I also have a mailname, so that mail to Robert.F.Goldstein@uic.edu still reaches me, but I prefer the short address.)

But something that you might not know about using netids as email addresses is that the redirection of mail to its proper address is done on CMS. That means that mail to bobg@uic.edu can't be forwarded if CMS is down, even if its destination has nothing to do with CMS. To remedy this drawback, we will have extra mail-forwarding servers, running on other machines, that will take over if CMS fails its duty. (Like kidneys, you only really need one, but having a backup brings peace of mind.)

An important side effect of this change is that the forwarding of mail addressed to uic.edu will not always be done by CMS. In particular, this means that mail addressed to U12345@uic.edu (as opposed to uicvm.uic.edu) will not necessarily be delivered. The fact that mail addressed in this way was delivered in the past is a feature-like bug; it was never intended to be used. If you insist on using your CMS userid in your mail address, you must include CMS's full name: U12345@uicvm.uic.edu. If, on the other hand, you like the shorter form, then get a netid and use it. Please!

 
     
MVS Fading Away
  The vast majority of people using the Computer Center's IBM 3090 mainframe use the CMS operating system, but we still have a small number people using MVS. Unfortunately, MVS has become too expensive for us to maintain, in terms of software, consulting, and the performance penalty for CMS. Also most, if not all, of the work done on MVS can probably be done more efficiently on CMS or a UNIX machine.

We are beginning to shift resources away from MVS until we can completely remove it. To start, we will remove SAS and PLSORT on April 2, when the current software licenses expire. We have attempted to personally notify everyone who has used these programs in the last several months, but if we missed you and you have any questions about how to transfer your work, please let us know.

The date for the ultimate demise of MVS has not been set yet, but you can expect us to continue to remove software as our MVS license for it expires.

Don't worry about your files in the MVS HSM archives. We're keeping them and we're writing software for CMS to retrieve files from HSM.

  
 

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2000-11-3  connect@uic.edu
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