Technical Details on The EMBL WWW Server

This page contains references to various technical aspects related to the management of this WWW Server that can be of interest to other Webmasters.

Usage

With the absence of any agreed policy on the appropriate way of estimating the usage of the WWW infoserver, usage is assessed by the crude number of hits recorded in the access.log file from the standard httpd daemon. Graphical representations are performed using public domain software hereafter described. All the public domain software packages have been tested; the one used here is a preferred package (wusage 3.2) . To present, the maximum access has been 56926 hits, and was observed during calendar week 21 of the current year 1995. Disk space used so far equals 78.718 Mbytes.

Hardware

This WWW server is running on a computer Silicon Graphics , running OS IRIX 5.3
The connection to the "outside" world is done at 2Mbit/sec by the Deutsche Forschung Netzwerk

Externally developed Software that is used by this Server

NCSA httpd server version 1.4.
New imagemap add-on to serve graphical clickable maps..
DOORSserver version 1.0
Cyberview-3d to support 3D structure manipulations, written by Paul Burchard
Glimpse, the tool for searching entire file systems written by Udi Manber
WebEvent as very flexible tool for managing reservation of resource through the WWW.
Wusage 3.2 to maintains usage statistics for the WWW server, written by Thomas Boutell
CCSO/QI is the sofware used for the maintenance of the Phone Book (for local users only). This software had been made by Steve Dorner and is maintained by Paul Pomes
WWW Mail gateway, (also used as template for several subscription programs). Written by Doug Stevenson
Momspider A web-roaming robo that specializes in the maintenance of distributed hypertext infostructures, written by Roy Fielding
WWW2GCG is installed and used as interface to the GCG Software. The latter is a major software system for DNA and protein sequences. The WWW2GCG interface had been written by Marc Colet.

Other Services that are in test phase

CU-SeeMe based videoconferencing (connect to reflector 3.0b3 running on copper.embl-heidelberg.de ports 6324 for nv and 6325 for vat. Conference ID=0. The new reflector version 4.0b1 is not yet stable on IRIX and therefore is not running yet. It will be used as soon as it is proved to be stable. )
Joining the Multimedia Integrated Conferencing for Europe project
Silverplatter based access to MEDLINE databases(connect to erl.embl-heidelberg.de port 416 as ANONYMOUS user. If the client does not find the server and ask for its name, its identifier is SP$qwertyuiop[] ). As soon as WebSPIRS will become available for running it on SGI, then it will be tested as-well.

WWW Software developed by the WebMaster

chkmail (ainterface to SMTP)
emblim-search (a interface to ACCESS data bases)
updatelocalinfo.pl (a script to combine the information on the status of various computers and display it on the WWW)
wan (automatic tool to graphically display status of a Wide Area Network)
wwwnews.pl (generate automatically the "What is new on this Server" page, depending to the client used it uses the <PRE> tag or the <TABLE> feature)

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Author: Toldo Last Updated: Friday, 21 July 1995