During 2003 several old Alpha workstations were replaced by newer ones or with PCs running Linux OS. Several high performance PCs, equipped with AMD Athlon XP 2200+ and 1GBy RAM have been installed, working typically as personal computer facility for large data reduction programs. To this purpose, these machines were also equipped with DAT and DVD-RW units, for data backup. The hydrodynamics group has completed the alpha workstation cluster adding a new HP DS20 Server with 1GByte RAM and 34GB disk.
The number of PCs used as Unix-Linux workstations continued to increase during 2003. Most of them have been updated with DVD-RW and SCSI DAT tapes.
A new HP Proliant DL380 Xeon bi-processor power-redundant linux server has been installed. This computer works as secondary DNS for the bo.astro.it domain, acts as DHCP server for the site and as CUPS printing server. The DHCP service is available only for authorized (via mac address) computers. This server now also hosts the network license manager for the IDL package and a new local news server (INN).
After the Observatory outsourced the mail service to the CeSIA (Centro per lo Sviluppo e Gestione Servizi Informatici d'Ateneo - Univ. of Bologna), two Active Directory servers, providing LDAP service for the mail server, have been installed.
In order to improve the network security, a firewall Fortigate 400 has been installed. This device has several advanced functions. Besides filtering incoming traffic and allowing the creation of network areas with different security policies, it also applies anti-virus filtering on incoming packets, black-listing of http sites and mail control on both input and output messages.
Additional personal firewalls have been installed on several PCs, both Linux and Windows.