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This is Volume 2, Issue 2 of Occasional Downtime, the still somewhat sporadic newsletter of HMC's Department of Academic Computing. Issues will (theoretically) be published once every two weeks, and will include articles of general interest, and a summary of the latest developments in the department.

Occasional Downtime is edited by Josh Smith, AC's User Support Coordinator, and most unattributed opinions, ideas, and writing are his. Other articles are written by the various staff and student employees of the department.

Availability

Occasional Downtime is available in several formats:

On the Gopher server, in Computing -> Occasional Downtime (from the root of the HMC data), accessible by the gopher client of your choice.
On the HMC World Wide Web Server, via a link on the Academic Computing page, accessible by the Web client of your choice (e.g. Mosaic).
By e-mail, from the mailing list downtime-dist-l: subscribe to the list to receive a copy of the plain text version of the newsletter when it's published.
By netnews, on the newsgroup mudd.acsv.
On paper: copies are available in the AC department office in Parsons 269, or at the Consultant's desk in the downstairs Mac lab.

Note that in the plaintext versions, words in italics are surrounded by tildes (~), like the word ``italics'' earlier in this sentence. Those tildes are not part of the words they surround: for example, an e-mail address like josh@hmc.edu would appear as josh@hmc.edu--the tildes aren't part of the address.

In This Issue

In this issue of Occasional Downtime, you'll find:

AC News, a brief synopsis of recent changes in Academic Computing.
What's Up, Docs?, a guide to the written documentation available for AC-supported resources.
Lists Galore, an overview of some of our many Listkeeper mailing lists.
What's In A (Domain) Name?, an explanation of how TCP/IP systems are named at Mudd and in Claremont (including the differences between hmc.edu and claremont.edu).

If you're reading this from the Web server, you can jump to an article by selecting one of the highlighted article titles in the above index.

AC News

Here are some brief summaries of some of the recent developments in the department. Some of this is old news by now, and the section is a lot longer than usual, due to the long delay between this issue and the previous; if we actually start publishing on a bi-weekly schedule, the news section will tend to be shorter and more current.

Gopher. We've completed the first version of a program to post e-mail messages to the Claremont Gopher server. The HMC Green Sheet and the residential life newsletter Halls Of Mudd are both now automatically posted to the gopher server by this program, known as ``Gopherbot''. If you'd be interested in making use of Gopherbot, or in anything gopher-related, contact Josh by any of the usual means.
Thuban. Our new DEC Alpha finally arrived, and is now a solid part of the VMS cluster. It's now available for general use, and most things work like just they do on the rest of the VMS machines. It does have a few quirks, though, so you should probably continue to do your critical VMS computing on one of the other nodes for now. Watch for an article about all the changes to the VMS landscape in a future issue...
FDDI. Osiris, Thuban, Kato, and Lurch are all now equipped with FDDI interfaces. FDDI is a high-speed fiber-optic networking technology, which will allow these systems to exchange more information with each other faster and more efficiently, all without adding load to the main campus Ethernet.
Consultants. Patience has the student Consultant program up and running, and the desk in the downstairs lab is now staffed weekdays and Sundays in the afternoon and evening. A number of new Student System Managers have also been hired, and the Departmental Liaison system is slowly getting off the ground as well.
Dorm mailing lists. We've finally gotten all the people involved coordinated enough to bring the dorm mailing lists up to date. If you find that you're still on the wrong list, send mail to Mike_Zoll@hmc.edu, and he'll get you onto the right list.
The students-l mailing list. This list is now ``moderated'': nothing sent to the list will be forwarded to the recipients until approved by the moderator. Josh is the current moderator; moderation policies will be published shortly.
Lab combos. We'll soon be setting the combination on the door to the downstairs Mac and PC lab, and will be changing the combination on the door to the upstairs lab to match. Current ETA is Thursday 24 Mar. The new combination will be distributed widely before then; if you manage to miss it, stop by Parsons 269 during normal business hours, and we'll fill you in. Please don't give the combination to non-HMC users, unless they're taking courses at Mudd (or are otherwise officially affiliated with the college).
UIWhois. ``UIWhat?'' You may not recognize the name, but you've probably used the service: it provides the data you get back when you finger someone@hmc.edu. The program that generates the data has recently been updated, and it now provides information about mailing lists as well: just finger ``listname@hmc.edu'' (replacing ``listname'' with the name of the list).

Documentation

When people need help with the systems supported by Academic Computing, the first place we encourage them to look is in the written documentation. Here's a summary of four of the most useful ways to access that documentation; a future article will talk about the best ways to get live help from the people in Academic Computing.

Via Gopher

Gopher is the canonical source for our documentation library, and anything we document will generally be available there. Gopher is a good lowest- common-denominator information system: it deals primarily in plain text and is available from anywhere--Macs, PCs, VMS, and Unix. If you've never used gopher before, check out the Using Gopher document. Once you've gotten the hang of the gopher system, it's the best place to look first for written documentation.

Via CLUE

From the VMS cluster (HMCVAX et al), you can use a locally-written system called CLUE to access the on-line documentation library. The docs available via CLUE are generally kept in sync with those on the gopher server, and VMS users may find the CLUE interface somewhat easier to use.

On Paper

On-line documentation is environmentally friendly, but it's sometimes just more convenient to have a piece of paper on your desk. In general, you should be able to print out a paper copy of any of the on-line documentation for yourself: most gopher clients support a print command, which allows you to print out any of the documentation on the gopher server. If you can't print out a particular document (for whatever reason), AC can send you a copy via campus mail. Send requests to ac-staff-l@hmc.edu, or call Cindy Souza at x8006.

Via Web

The World Wide Web is powerful and flexible information system, which allows documents to include links to any other document in the Web. This ``hypertext'' capability makes documentation written for the Web more dynamic and useful than its plaintext counterpart. We're experimenting with writing Web versions of some of our documentation now; check it out with the Web client of your choice (Mosaic for Macintosh or Windows works particularly well), and let us know what you think.

For more information

If you have questions or comments about the documentation for a particular system, your best bet is to contact the sysadmins for the system via e-mail (usually system@machinename or machinename-system-l@hmc.edu). If you have questions or comments about AC documentation in general, drop Josh a line.

Lists Galore

AC maintains a wide variety of mailing lists, using an automated list manager called ``Listkeeper''. Based on Brent Chapman's ``Majordomo'' package, Listkeeper provides a flexible but consistent interface for dealing with what can sometimes seem like a bewildering number of lists.

Here are some of the categories of lists we maintain, and some examples of each.

Academic Computing: We have lists of people who work for AC, such as ac-consultants-l (student Consultants), ac-staff-l (AC Staff), and ac-employees-l (superset of the previous two). We also maintain a variety of system-specific lists: for example, for the Macs, we have mac-l for general Macintosh discussion, and mac-system-l for Macintosh system managers. There are lists for software packages, such as emacs-l, maple-l, and tex-l. There are also lists for AC-related projects, such as infosys-l, listkeeper-l, and userinfo-l.
Departments: Each department has two mailing lists: one for faculty, and one for all full-time employees of the department (faculty and staff). Biology's lists, for example, are bio-fac-l and bio-dept-l. There's also other-fac-l, for faculty not affiliated with a particular department, and a few cross-departmental lists, such as fd-fac-l (for faculty who teach Freshman Division courses).
Majors: Each department has a mailing list of majors by year, and a superset list for all of the hears. For example, the Biology majors' lists are bio-majors-94-l, bio-majors-95-l, bio-majors-96-l, and bio-majors-l.
Courses: Several courses have mailing lists for their students, which are used for announcements, discussion, etc. Examples include psyc104-l, psyc53-l, bio101-l, and cs124-l. There are also lists for several of the Engineering, Math, and CS clinic teams.
Dorms: As mentioned earlier, we've finally straightened out the dorm mailing lists. There's one for each dorm, such as south-dorm-l. There's also apts-dorm-l, for people living in the apartments, and no-dorm-l, for folks living off-campus.
Class years: There are five lists of students by class, such as hmc1997-l. The notorious students-l is a superset list of all five lists, which is now moderated to prevent spurious traffic. Bypassing the moderator by sending directly to the sub-lists is strongly discouraged, except in emergencies.
Committees: Several HMC committees have mailing lists for their members: examples include hmccc-l (HMC Computing Committee), lrpc-l (Long Range Planning Committee), and sfc-l (Student-Faculty Council). Some of these lists also have informational lists, where announcements and other public information is sent, such as hmccc-info-l. The committee lists themselves are generally closed, and are primarily for discussion among the committee members, but questions or comments for the committee as a whole can also be directed to the appropriate list.
Publications: Two HMC publications are distributed via e-mail. Occasional Downtime is sent to downtime-dist-l, and the HMC Green Sheet is sent to greensheet-dist-l. We expect there to be more of these sorts of lists to increase in the future.
Interest groups: A variety of HMC student groups have mailing lists associated with the group. Examples include eris-l (Discordians), sailing-club-l (Sailing Club), and swe-l (Society of Women Engineers). There are also a few lists for hobbies, such as spellcast-l and deckmaster-l.

If you'd like to to create a new mailing list created, send e-mail to list-request@hmc.edu. Send any questions or problems regarding Listkeeper to listkeeper-manager@hmc.edu. For more general information about Listkeeper, see the article in the previous issue of Occasional Downtime.

What's In A (Domain) Name?

All TCP/IP hosts on the campus network have IP numbers (like 134.173.32.20) and DNS names (like osiris.ac.hmc.edu). In the past, all of the Claremont Colleges were in the claremont.edu domain--their DNS names ended in .claremont.edu--but as the number of computers at each of the colleges has grown, administering a single namespace for all of Claremont has become more and moreinfeasable. Thus, the various colleges have requested a new set of domain names: mckenna.edu, cgs.edu, hmc.edu, pitzer.edu, pomona.edu, rsabg.edu, and stc.edu. (scripps.edu and cmc.edu were already taken; Scripps hasn't yet picked an alternative domain name.)

Here at Mudd, we've already moved all of our systems into the hmc.edu domain, and Pitzer is in the process of making the move to pitzer.edu. The other colleges will be following suit as time permits (Pomona is reportedly planning to move this summer, for example). Existing systems will typically retain claremont.edu nicknames for historical reasons, but new systems generally won't get nicknames in the claremont.edu namespace. In the future, claremont.edu will be reserved for systems shared by the all of the Claremont Colleges, such as the Claremont Gopher server.

Specifying domain names is still relatively easy. In general, if you specify a host by only the first part of its DNS name (e.g. ``osiris'' instead of ``osiris.ac.hmc.edu''), the system you're on will try to construct the full domain name, by appending domains to the name you specified. Most systems will first try ``sub.hmc.edu'' (where ``sub'' is the subdomain you're in), and then hmc.edu, returning an error if neither succeeds; others; others can fall back to claremont.edu as well. When in doubt, specifying the full domain name should always work.

If you have any questions about DNS or domain names, send e-mail to dns-admin-l@hmc.edu.

Coming attractions

In future issues of Occasional Downtime, you'll find articles like:

Reshaping VMS, an overview of the recent changes to the VMS cluster.
About Userinfo, a guide to AC's under-publicized user information database.
Getting started with the World Wide Web, a quick-and-easy introduction to this powerful hypertext resource.

And much, much more... Stay tuned!