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Soon after the Engineering Administration Building (ENAD) Sun workstation laboratories were opened by PUCC in Fall 1992, Engineering faculty began teaching classes in the labs. In doing so, the faculty encountered difficulties as a result of the commands and applications on the lab systems not being the same as those found on ECN Sun workstations. Reports of these difficulties led to discussions within Dean Yang's Engineering Computing Committee. The Committee concluded that ECN and PUCC should better coordinate the operation of their UNIX systems and subsequently directed ECN and PUCC to evolve their respectively administered systems toward compatibility and consistency with particular emphasis on (1) compatibility of the ENAD Sun systems, (2) coordination of UNIX system user accounts, and (3) expanded network file access.
The initial project emphasis is to achieve the three objectives of the Committee for Sun workstations. As resources permit, other platforms will be included later. A more specific description of the current goal is as follows:
1. To unify the command set and command locations offered on ECN and PUCC UNIX systems. This will be accomplished by defining three separate layers of commands.
Site-Specific Software /usr/site/sitename/bin Common UNIX Environment Software /usr/local/bin,/usr/opt/bin UNIX Operating System Software /usr/ucb,/usr/bin,/binThe UNIX Operating System Software layer contains the commands offered by each vendor's UNIX implementation. This includes commands such as ls, cat, vi, sh, etc. The contents of this layer will vary somewhat from vendor to vendor.
The Common UNIX Environment Software layer contains the add-on commands that are supported by the ECN and PUCC staff. This included commands such as the X Window System, GNU EMACS, the GNU C compiler, USENET news readers, Kermit, ZMODEM, etc. It also includes third-party software packages such as Island Graphics, MATLAB, AutoCAD, and Lotus 1-2-3. This layer will look exactly the same on all systems that are part of the CUE.
The Site-Specific Software layer allows each site to provide additional software that is applicable only to that site. For example, a school that purchases a discipline-specific software package, or that develops a piece of software for use only within that school, would install it in this layer. By design, this layer will be different on different hosts - a host in Electrical Engineering will have a different set of site-specific commands than one in Nuclear Engineering. However, it will be possible for each user to "take his environment with him" when moving to another site. For example, it will be possible to access the site-specific software from Agricultural Engineering while using a workstation at the Chemical Engineering site.
2. To make login names and user id numbers consistent across all systems in the CUE.
This means, for example, that a student in the Schools of Engineering will have the same login name, not only on all ECN UNIX systems (as is true today), but also on any PUCC systems on which he or she has an account (for example, when taking a class in Computer Science). This will have a number of advantages, not the least of which is that electronic mail will be considerably simplified. Once this goal has been achieved, you will be able to send mail to someone simply be specifying his or her login name, without having to worry about specifying @ecn.purdue.edu or @cc.purdue.edu, and without having to worry about whether the person's login name is the same on ECN and PUCC hosts.
3. To enable NFS cross-mounting of file systems between all hosts in the CUE.
This will make it possible for a user to log in on any host and have the same home directory, not only on all ECN systems (as is true today), but also on any PUCC system on which he or she has an account. This will not only make it easier for the ECN and PUCC staffs to administer disk space, but it will also make it easier for users to work from a variety of locations without having to constantly FTP files back and forth from one host to another.
The Sun workstation platform and the Solaris operating system will be used for initial development of the Common UNIX Environment. When ECN and PUCC systems are converted to Solaris in Summer 1994, the first goal described above will have been achieved: the software environment offered on all ECN and PUCC Solaris systems will be the same. In addition to its Solaris hosts, the ECN plans to implement the Common UNIX Environment on it Sun-3 hosts, in order to offer a consistent environment between Sun-3 and SPARC systems.
The second goal, common login names and user ids, is expected to be achieved during the 1994-1995 school year. Reaching this goal will require making major changes in the administrative procedures for installing new accounts on ECN and PUCC systems, including the development of several new pieces of software (this development is currently underway). It will also necessitate negotiating with the owners of login names that are duplicated between ECN and PUCC systems, in order to resolve conflicts.
The third goal described above, NFS cross-mounting, is expected to be achieved in Summer 1995. A prerequisite for accomplishing this goal is to coordinate the user id numbers in use on ECN and PUCC systems, as described above. Following this, a number of administrative details will have to be worked out.
The times of completion for the second and third goals described above are preliminary estimates, and may change in the future. However, the staffs of the Engineering Computer Network and the Computer Center are committed to achieving them, and we believe that the end result will be well worth the effort.
After the initial CUE has been developed for the Solaris hosts (and ECN's Sun-3 hosts), other architectures, such as Engineering's Hewlett-Packard workstations and the Computer Center's IBM RS/6000 compute clusters will be brought into the CUE. The CUE project will serve to remove many productivity impediments experienced by students, faculty and staff when utilizing computer systems that are administered by different campus computer support organizations. It is hoped that the other campus UNIX installations will join the project, and that eventually a campus-wide Common UNIX Environment can be achieved.
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