Introduction to LIONS (OLD)

LIONS was created with redundancy and fault tolerance as it's primary objective. It features fault tolerant servers, a fully mirrored Storage Area Network (SAN), fault tolerant routers for the SAN, a security master server with replica servers, a file system master server (with replica servers), an Enterprise Level backup/restore solution, and a uniform environment for all academic UNIX users.

LIONS also provides centralized services such as FTP, UNIX software license management, printing, Enterprise Level web and documentation servers, and features a web/e-mail based help request system.

Everyone is encouraged to visit our LIONS web pages for current system news and status as well as useful instructions and documentation. New users, please be sure to read this introduction. All LIONS users are encouraged to subscribe to the lions-announce@list.odu.edu mailing list by either sending an email with the word "subscribe" in the Subject to lions-announce-request@list.odu.edu or by visiting the page http://list.odu.edu/listinfo/lions-announce. If you have been given access to the LIONS high performance computing resources, please subscribe to supercomputer-users@list.odu.edu as well.

The Building Blocks of LIONS - Kerberos, OpenAFS, OpenLDAP

The underlying structure which makes up the LIONS architecture are:

• Kerberos is a network authentication protocol. It is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography. LIONS uses the free implementation of this protocol available from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• OpenAFS is a distributed filesystem that enables co-operating hosts (clients and servers) to efficiently share filesystem resources across both local area and wide area networks. AFS is a distributed filesystem product, pioneered at Carnegie Mellon University and supported and developed as a product by Transarc Corporation (now IBM Pittsburgh Labs). It offers a client-server architecture for file sharing, providing location independence, scalability and transparent migration capabilities for data. IBM branched the source of the AFS product, and made a copy of the source available for community development and maintenance. They called the release OpenAFS.
• OpenLDAP is used as the naming services "glue" which binds the Kerberos and OpenAFS information together.

General Information About LIONS accounts

• Student account disk quotas are 256MB, while faculty and staff disk quotas are 512MB. If you are a faculty or staff member and you run out of space, send your request to unixhelp@odu.edu along with a brief justification for the additional space. If you are a student and you run out of space, please have your instructor or faculty advisor make the request for you.
• Once you have a LIONS account you automatically have access to the High Performance Computing environment which includes access to Helios, the Sun Microsystems E10000, and Hydra, a Sun Microsystems SunFire 2900. Select 'HPC Docs' under 'navigation' on the left for more information regarding the HPC environment.
• Faculty and staff may request the ability to host a university related web page from their LIONS account via a public_html directory. In most cases students may obtain this ability through the authorization of a department representative. In neither case is this ability on by default unless it was requested at the time the account was created. Just having a public_html directory will not make its contants accessible via the web. More information is available on this page.

What You Should Know

The UNIX Support Group is unable to provide instructional or tutorial services to individual users or groups. If you are unfamiliar with UNIX, we've provided links to some web based UNIX tutorials. To view them, click on UNIX Tutorials.

It is STRONGLY recommended that all users familiarize themselves with topics covered in this document. Many user problems can be avoided by taking the time to understand an overview of the various components of the LIONS system, such as Kerberos, LDAP, and OpenAFS.