From: rrezaian@austral.chi.il.us (Russell Rezaian)
Newsgroups: chi.mail
Subject: Re: Software used/etc.
Date: 28 Dec 92 02:57:11 GMT
Organization: D.O.C. Data Processing Systems

In article <electric.05ea@meltdown.chi.il.us> electric@meltdown.chi.il.us (Rick Martinez) writes:
>To add a system to the clout project, exactly what type of software/hardware
>preferences do you recommend.

I am not entirely sure what you mean by this question.  You do not make
clear just exactly what type of addition to the project you are talking
about.

First off, the Clout project is a group of people who are involved in
improving E-Mail connectivity in the Chicago area, we also have a strong
mandate to encourage the use of Domainist addressing wherever possible,
and as such we have chosen to be involved with the .us domain project.

As for things done with machines, which I assume is what you are talking
about, there are a few ways a machine may become "involved" in the project.
If you have a machine that you would like to have registered in a domain,
we can do that for you.  We can also provide E-mail connections.  We
currently have well over 150 such client sites in the area.

All you need is a mail package for your machine, this can be included if
you have UNIX, or there are add ons for other operating systems, such as
the Amigas native OS, the Macintosh and even a few packages for MS-DOS.  I
believe it is possible to shoehorn a working mail package into a basic
MS-DOS machine with verly little drive space.  I even have a package
somewhere for CP/M (though it is a bear to do E-mail without a clock).

The clout machine itself is a distributed multi node virtual machine.  It
actually spreads over several different physical computers (currently only
2 of them are fully active, though more are planned) and is functionally
the same to the outside world (with a few minor cosmetic changes) across
the board.

I may be wrong, but it appears you are asking about the requirements of a
machine that will host a clout virtual machine session.  We usually refer
to such a machine as a clout node (as opposed to a client which is a real
machine that real people use).  The current clout nodes are all UNIX
workstations.  The original clout nodes when the project was first started
were AT&T 3B1 machines, however some of the limitations of those machines
(mostly in the area of networking) prompted us to move to Sun
workstations.  The last 3B1 was replaced about a year ago with a System V
r4 machine which may be replaced by annother Sun soon.

As for a basic set of minimum requirements:

o It has to run some version of UNIX.
o HDB (or BNU for those who read AT&T docs) UUCP is STRONGLY desired.
o BSD networking, is NOT currently essential with this version of the
   software, but that may change very soon.
o A more or less complete set of UNIX utilities is required, we depend
   on such programs as awk and make.  C and development tools should
   go without saying...

As for hardware, or big problem is disk space.  Currently the clout
software alone takes several megs of space.  Our databse is rather small
now, but it will chunk up dramatically in the next releases.  The
underlying mail transport agents take about 3 to 5 megs, but that might not
count depening on whether the system is handling much non-clout related
mail traffic (enough to justify the prescence of a more verstile MTA).
The real crunch actually comes from the mail traffic itself.

So once UNIX is installed, including the development tools, we throw in
about annother 5 to 20 megs of sundry utilities (depending on just exactly
what we will be doing, and how much of what we need is already present)
and annother 2 or 3 megs of clout specific software and data.

Then there comes spool space requirements.

As an example, my home machine which only recieves mail for one person
(who else?) runs anywhere from a few hundred k of traffic weekly (if I am
more or less out of things) to about 400k outgoing (my all time high) and
a few megs incoming (and none of it ftpmail!) weekly.  Many sites in the
area that are clients are public access systems with anywhere from 20 to a
few hundred users.  While not all of them are quite as active e-mail users
as I am, some can be much worse.

>As a couple clout members know, I am interested in this project.  Let me know
>and I'll see what I can do.  I also might be able to get a shitty little
>college (Harper Community College) into this as I know the computer dept.
>heads.

We really appreciate your interest!  As you can see, what we need most is
disk space.  As I mentioned in my last post we really don't need any more
clout nodes right now; however, if you know anyone who would be willing to
donate a few hundred megs of SCSI disk to the project, we could really
use it!

The larger clout node is running right on the ragged edge, and has been that
way for over a year.  There was a time when we could do some very limited
development work on that machine, now it's a struggle to do simple software
upgrades.  We need to get to work on the next release of the software, and
while we have a machine ready to play host to our experimentation, we don't
have any drive space for it.
--
Russell Rezaian			|  rrezaian@austral.chi.il.us
  rrezaian@clout.chi.il.us	|  rrezaian@zed.chi.il.us