The switchover went pretty smoothly, with tape failure adding some unexpected time to the process. All personal files and information were transferred to the new system, and new versions of the user programs (like Pine and Pico) were installed on the machine. The web server software was changed from NSCA to Apache, which is a faster and more modern web server.
The new Marcus should be much more responsive than the old Marcus. It has about over 3 times as much memory and about twice as much disk space. It also has a faster network card. Earlier this academic year, WCTS moved the Whitman Home Page and Domain Name Server (DNS) from the old Marcus to other computers. The combined effect of all of these changes should provide you with a much more responsive and stable network.
On the old Marcus, each person had a disk quota or limit. This was done because we had a very limited amount of disk space that was shared by everyone that used Marcus.
The new Marcus does not use disk quotas to limit individual usage of disk space. Instead, each group (ie, Class of '98, Class of '99, Faculty, Staff) is located on its own disk. The advantage to this system is that a person could download that 30MB file if they need to, and then delete it when it isn't needed anymore. Obviously, this brings up the issue of someone abusing the disk space and limiting his/her classmates' space. Hopefully, each group will learn to police itself; it will be a good lesson for the entire Whitman community on shared resources and our impact on fellow users.
WCTS still asks that each person only store Whitman College related files on Marcus and regularly delete any files that they no longer need. To be safe, you should always store a second copy of any important files in another location, such as your local hard disk, floppy disks or a ZIP cartridge.
So what's happening to the old Marcus? It is staying on with us and will house the high-powered statistical analysis packages uses by various offices and classes on campus. It will also house the professional compilers, and will hopefully handle all of Whitman's outgoing e-mail. All of these are functions Marcus currently serves, and moving them to the old machine will make the new machine even faster.
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