(MCC Local Newsletter: 9/9/2000)

Over the Summer, there have been a few changes to the Proxy/Cache service. First was at the breakup of the joint Manchester/UMIST service, which meant that UMIST have taken over the running of their own systems which included two out of five of the Proxy/Cache servers.

Since then, the Manchester Cache team have taken delivery of four new PC systems which are now in service as an LVS (Linux Virtual Server) cluster which now forms the backbone of the Manchester Proxy/Cache service. The LVS cluster currently consists of one director system as a load-balancer and three slave systems. Over the coming months the three older systems are going to have the existing FreeBSD systems replaced with Linux so that they may be added to the new LVS cluster.

All document requests are sent to the Director on behalf of the cluster, which then acts as a load balancer to tunnel the requests to the Slave systems. The Slave system will either serve the document directly to the user or request an updated document from the remote system.

Just in case you were wondering, the MC internal name for the LVS cluster is SNOW-WHITE and each PC will be given the name of one of the seven dwarfs. Externally from the users point of view, the existing service names of:

wwwcache.mcc.ac.uk

and wwwcache.man.ac.uk

will still apply, as will the port number of 3128.

If you were using any of the older system names explicitly, such as:

rascal.mcc.ac.uk, littledevil.mcc.ac.uk or tyke.mcc.ac.uk

then we suggest you change to one of the normal service names (above) as soon as possible. We will keep these names around for the forseeable future but as stated above each of the actual systems will be reinstalled with Linux and LVS software.

If you were using either of the following:

scamp.mcc.ac.uk or scallywag.mcc.ac.uk

you'll find that you need to change to one of the service names (above) NOW, as these systems were the property of UMIST and have been withdrawn from service at MC.

If you are making use of the autoproxy-config facility of your browser at:

http://wwwconfig.mcc.ac.uk/config.pac

or http://wwwconfig.man.ac.uk/config.pac

then you do not need to change anything, as we will have modified the configuration script to cater for the changes by the time you read this.

If you need to contact the Manchester Cache team, Support queries for Manchester should be directed in the first instance by electronic mail to:

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which is a local distribution list or by phone to any of the following:

John Heaton 0161 275 6011

Andrew Veitch 0161 275 7195

George Neisser 0161 275 6007

The Manchester Proxy/Cache web site is at:

http://www.net.mcc.ac.uk/Cache/

You can find more information on the LVS cluster systems at the LVS web site:

http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

or http://wwwcache.ja.net/LVS/

Details of the JANET Web Cache Service (JWCS) is available at:

http://wwwcache.ja.net/

UMIST have taken responsibility for their own autoproxy-config facility and UMIST support queries should be directed to the UMIST Support Unit and NOT to MC.

John Heaton

Manchester Computing