Obsolete services on pangea terminate on April 7, 2008
Last revision March 10, 2008
As preparation for replacing our old pangea server with new systems, minor services provided by pangea that are obsolete or rarely used will be terminated on April 7, 2008. The following services will stop working on that date. See details below for alternatives and work-arounds if you still use any of these services on pangea.
The pangea "msgs" electronic bulletin board.
Begun in 1990, the "msgs" system on pangea was an informal bulletin board - the electronic equivalent of posting flyers in the elevator. In the last 18 years, over 21,000 messages have been posted.
This simple system has fallen into dis-use in the past few years. There have been no postings in months. The pangea system logs show only about one request per day to view the bulletin board. As we are simplifying network services to prepare for new servers, the pangea "msgs" system will be discontinued on April 7.
As an alternative, you can submit announcements of academically related events to the School's official online events calendar.
Print spooling for Windows and Unix/Linux workstations.
About ten years ago, most of the printers in Earth Sciences only communicated on the network with AppleTalk protocols and could not be directly accessed by Windows or Unix/Linux workstations. Thus, we installed software on pangea that could advertise Windows print shares on the network, and then spool (or queue) the print jobs to send them to AppleTalk printers.
All our printers can now handle direct connections from Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix/Linux systems. There is no longer any need to print through pangea, and in fact, it is more efficient to print directly. And this print spooling software on pangea will stop working anyway when we eliminate the use of AppleTalk protocols on our network.
Windows print shares on pangea, as well as remote printing for Unix/Linux workstations, will be disabled on April 7.
Windows users - check the properties on the printers you have enabled on your workstation. If the network port involves "pangea.stanford.edu", then you need to delete that printer and recreate it with a direct connection. Follow instructions on the Printing from a Windows PC web page.
Unix and Linux users - if you have defined a printer queue that sends to a queue on pangea, modify it to send directly to the lpd port on the network printer. You can request help to make this configuration change from Kai Lanz.
AppleShare file sharing for "Classic" Mac OS (the pangea Aufs server).
AppleShare was the original network file sharing protocol for Macintosh computers, dating back to the mid 1980s. We used open-source software to create an AppleShare server on pangea beginning in 1991 named pangea Aufs. This server allowed Macintosh users to store files on pangea, but it used a special file system format that made it difficult to share those files with Unix or Windows users.
Mac OS X includes support for the Windows CIFS network file system, thus providing complete interoperability between the two operating systems for files stored on a network server. The Samba program on pangea implements CIFS to provide network access to file storage for PCs running either Windows or Mac OS X.
Only "Classic" Macs (Mac OS 9 or earlier) need AppleShare to access network servers; Mac OS X can and should use CIFS. In fact, the AppleShare server on pangea works poorly with Mac OS X. Furthermore, the software that enables the AppleShare server on pangea is old and unsupported and uses plain-text (unencrypted) logins, which are not secure.
Classic Macs are now rare or non-existent in Earth Sciences. There is virtually no evidence in system logs that anyone is using the pangea Aufs AppleShare server. The network file storage (home and scratch directories) on pangea will be migrated later this spring or summer to a new high capacity file server, which will not have any support for AppleShare. Thus, it is time to eliminate this obsolete protocol.
If you still have any files stored on the pangea Aufs AppleShare server, you need to get them now. Those files will be erased from the pangea disks on April 7. In principle, a Mac OS X computer can connect to this AppleShare server, by selecting the Connect to Server... item from the Go menu in the Finder, and then typing afp://pangea.stanford.edu/ in the Server Address: field.
But if any file in your pangea Aufs directory contains a slash character (/) in the filename, as was commonly used for dates, a Mac OS X connection to pangea Aufs will behave erratically (not listing all files) or fail completely. This is because the slash character was valid in Classic Mac OS but is invalid in Mac OS X. If you are having problems accessing old files on pangea Aufs, send an email to the pangea system managers to get help.
PC/NFS access to pangea files for Windows workstations.
PC/NFS was a method for Windows PCs to access file sharing on Unix servers via the NFS protocol (native to Unix). It was rarely used on pangea, as special software had to be purchased and installed on the PC. It was made obsolete when the Samba software was installed on pangea to turn pangea directories into Windows file shares on the network.
It is unlikely that anyone is still using PC/NFS to access files on pangea. The service will be disabled on April 7. Windows users can connect via pangea network file shares instead.
Time-sharing computing cycles for teaching or research.
When created in 1990, the original pangea server was far faster than PCs, so faculty and students were encouraged to use it to run Fortran and C programs for analyzing data. Some open-source scientific programs such as GMT and supcrt were even installed to support computing for course exercises.
No one does any serious computing on pangea anymore, and we are not planning to support general time-sharing (shell) access to future servers.
If you are still running any programs that you have compiled yourself on pangea, or that were compiled and installed for your courses, you need to port those programs to another platform. In most cases, they can be compiled and run on the Unix Computing Resources provided by ITS for general campus use. If you need help with this process, send an email to the pangea system managers.
Time-sharing (shell) access to pangea will not actually end on April 7, but will end within a few months thereafter as we bring up a new generation of servers. Please check now if you need to move programs to a new platform.