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Computer Happenings At ABE

Stan Harlow

Several computer changes have taken place over the summer in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering department. Here are a few bits of information about what has been successful in our department.

• The entire ABE building ethernet wiring and networking equipment has been replaced with the new Purdue Data Network (PDN) wiring. Each ethernet computer is now connected via twisted pair cable to a data jack in one of 86 office PICs (Purdue Information Connections). The PDN wiring provides a common campus-wide 10BaseT connection. The transfer from ECN/ABE supported ethernet wiring and equipment to PDN went fairly smoothly. Most people were unaware of the change.
• All 66 Sun computers in ABE have been upgraded to run Solaris 2.5, Sun's latest operating system.
• Drs. Jones and Engel in ABE have been successful in receiving a Sun Academic Equipment Grant to the Department. Sun has donated a 2-200 MHZ Ultra 2 compute server for use in a Java-based community information project. In addition, we anticipate that all users in ABE will be able to access one of Sun's fastest computers for both interactive and long-running research processes.
• We have been pleased with the performance of a new HP 5SiMX laser printer installed this past spring. This 24 page per minute printer has printed over 156,000 sheets without problems. ABE has strived to make low-cost quality printing readily available to all ABE staff and students, including color printing. A new Apple Color LaserWriter 12/600 PS printer has been installed to provide fast and inexpensive plain paper color prints and transparencies. The cost of color printing continues to drop.
• ABE uses a program called Samba running on its Sun fileserver to share UNIX files to MicroSoft PCs running Windows 3.11 and Windows 95. Under Windows 95, Samba allows long UNIX filenames to appear without mapping the filenames to the 8.3 DOS filename. Samba also handles UNIX group permissions and UNIX printers properly so office staff can share their UNIX resources more easily on PC's.
• Computer SIMM memory prices have dropped dramatically. For example, the price for a 4MB Sparc 2 SIMM dropped from $150.00 one year ago to $30.00 now. It is a good time to feed a memory-starved computer with additional SIMM memory to greatly improve its performance.

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