Another variation of the game is called Hex. If you want to play a game of Hex just start an NX Session, and run the command "six".

For this coming month, I am looking towards getting a site-wide installation method for the Cell Broadband Simulator. If you want to try installing it on your own Linux computer at home, follow these instructions I created.

Keep your ideas and software suggestions coming!

If you want to try it out, just follow these simple instructions.

We have also initiated a new backup scheme. We do incremental backups every night and store data for the past 30 days. So if you accidentally delete a file on your computer that isn't newer than the last backup(24 hours max), just email us and we will be able to get it for you.

We are also going to phase the omega-user and omega-announce mailing list. Instead we will just send important messages and announcements to your omega email account, so make sure you either check it or have it forwarded if you want to keep up to date.

Last but not least. Samba is finally up and running. Even if you had an account before you need to email help@omega.cs.iit.edu to enable your account again.

Have a happy Groundhog's Day!

If there are any additional packages you would like, feel free to ask. There is lots to play around with, so enjoy!

In the next week or so, we will be installing a UPS system, which will hopefully keep Omega online, even during power outages. Stay tuned for future news.

The new system is running Gentoo Linux, which means it will be easy to keep all packages updated frequently for the latest stable/secure versions. If you notice there is an outdated package or service, please notify me immediately.

I wish everyone a happy holidays and happy hacking!

The biggest change was Omega's upgrade to Debian testing. The packages in stable were simply getting too outdated and we decided, after careful consideration and research, to upgrade. We've only had one problem with the new distribution so far - the bug was reported and is being fixed. It currently has no effects on any users.

With testing came gcc 3.0. Omega's actually hosting gcc 3.3.2, and you can experiment with all the new features and optimizations as you compile your programs with it.

An unfortunate, but perhaps necessary change was CNS's decision to block many ports from outside IIT. The only Omega service that we are aware of being blocked is Samba. It is currently not possible to connect to any of Omega's shares.

As of today, Omega has 188 registered users, and the number is growing every day. More databases are being created, together with more CVS repositories and Tomcat contexts. Get yours today!

Despite the fact that one of Omega's system administrators graduated from IIT, we are both still actively working on the server just like we always did. Also, even though this sentence may not last here very long, Omega is still distributing many of Microsoft's applications through the MSDNAAP program free of charge, including Windows XP Professional, Visual Studio.NET, the complete MSDN library, and Windows Server 2003. Why not give them a try?

As of today, all new email is delivered to your Mailbox. Your old email is still located in /var/spool/mail and can be read using the mutt or mail program. After you've read all your messages, you can configure Mutt to read email from the new Maildir directory by creating a .muttrc file in your home directory and pasting the following in:

set mbox_type=Maildir
set folder="~/Maildir/"
set mbox="~/Maildir/"
set spoolfile="~/Maildir/"

Omega's IMAP server is SSL-enabled for added security, and runs on port 993. The SSL certificate is not signed by an official signing authority, however. Simply allow the certificate to be accepted, as we currently use it for encryption purposes only. An SSL-enabled POP3 server is still available on port 995 and the same certificate rule applies.

If you are concerned with INBOX being the top-level directory in your email client, see this page.

Finally, note that you will be unable to connect to the IMAP server unless the Maildir directory structure exists in your home directory. The structure is automatically created when you receive your first email, or by executing

maildirmake Maildir

Thanks to the upgrade, Omega is now able to fulfill the requirements of being the official MSDNAAP distribution point for IIT. IIT's Computer Science department will soon make selected Microsoft software available for educational purposes to all interested CS students. All relevant files will be stored on Omega, allowing for fast access from within IIT's network.

Concurrently with the upgrade, Omega finally received a real A record in IIT's DNS records. This means that Omega's hostname, omega.cs.iit.edu directly resolves to its IP address, 216.47.152.136, which in turn resolves to omega.cs.iit.edu. This means a correct hostname in your emails, 'w' outputs on remote hosts you connected to, and Putty windows. Thanks to Vladimir Andrijevik and CNS for making this possible!

Lastly, we are experimenting with the phpBB Bulletin Board system on Omega, and would like to invite you to check them out, tell us if you like them, and definitely send in some new topic ideas!

As a result of this increased usage and in an effort to better serve you, Omega will soon become much more powerful. Thanks to a very generous and welcome donation from the Computer Science Department, Omega will go through a scheduled hardware upgrade Thursday February 13th (a more precise timeframe will follow). Details of the upgrade include:

• ASUS A7V8X Motherboard with RAID, Gigabit LAN, Serial ATA, and Firewire
• AMD Athlon XP 2200+
• 512 MB PC2700 RAM
• Western Digital 80 GB Ultra ATA/100 harddrive, 7200 RPM, 8 MB Buffer, 8.9 ms Average Read Seek Time (WD800JB)

What this means for you, our users:

• Much better performance with respect to raw processing power
• Greatly enhanced harddrive performance for disk intensive tasks
• Greater stability and more reliable service as Omega grows
• Disk quota increased to 100 MB for every user

• Official Gentoo Linux rsync and/or full distribution mirror
• Distributed compilation capability with distcc and our old, dual CPU Omega
• Other ideas? E-mail us

The first very interesting addition is that of Valgrind. Valgrind is a tool to help you find memory-management problems in your programs. It can also analyze the cache behavior of your program as well as generating a detailed source listing of all bottlenecks in your program. Another new piece of software, or more exactly an entire suite of packages, enables MPI support on Omega. MPI is the Message Passing Interface used almost exclusively for parallel and distributed applications. While it's true that Omega is not part of a cluster (yet), you can still run all your MPI tasks on Omega.

Thanks to the great influx of new accounts on Omega, several security and system policy issues were able to be hammered out in the last month. They all pertain to protecting user's web pages from people who should not be looking at them. Details are laid out in the Website HOWTO and should be used immediately. As a side note, Omega has performed extremely well over the past month with no sign of performance problems as of yet.

As of few days ago, IIT's name servers were updated and the hostname omega.cs.iit.edu now points to Dual's IP address. Well, that's not exactly true. With the domain name switch, we also switched the hostname, and Dual's new hostname is now Omega!

Let us know if you have any questions regarding the domain name switch. All services should be working the same way they always have. No problems should have arisen due to this change.

Feel free to subscribe to the omega-user mailing list and discuss Omega related issues with other Omega users. The system administrators periodically check the postings and will be more than happy to answer any questions you may have about getting an account, connecting to Omega, setting up your website, or Linux in general.

As a sidebar, Omega's uptime is over 45 days!  (ed. 10/16/02 -- not after the power outage...)

Have a great week!

Speaking of hostnames, Omega's system administrators have requested a real, cs.iit.edu hostname for Omega. We are currently in the negotiation stage and planning on keeping you updated along the way.

Looking for a nice console-based mail client to check your mail? Give mutt a try. What about a text editor? joe is pretty good. Don't like it and we don't have what you want? Let us know.

The Tomcat servlet container now runs behind the Apache web server. This means you can mix JavaServer pages, Java servlets, PHP pages, CGI scripts and anything else in your HTML directory and have them all accessible through your personal webpage address! (Why? Because you can! :-)) We also switched away from Sun's leaky javac compiler to IBM's fast Jikes compiler. Tomcat now uses Jikes for compiling all your JSP pages!

If you'd like to use Omega to develop websites using Servlets and JSPs, send us an email and we'll create a Context for your new web application (takes only a couple seconds). A detailed guide on what you'll have to do then and how to get started with JSP/Servlet development will be posted shortly. Check back soon!

To bump security up just a tad, a simple firewall was configured on Omega. It only affects connections from outside the campus, you can still connect to where ever you like from IIT.

We did a little more work on CVS and if you'd like to try it out for any of your projects and assignments, you should! It's easy and there's two ways to do it. You can either create and initialize your own repository wherever you have write access on Omega, or use the system-wide repository in /var/cvs. If you'd like a module created in the system-wide repository, email us and we'll set one up right away. The benefits of having a module setup in the main repository are two-fold: it will be accessible from any on-campus computer using the pserver mechanism, and being recognized by the ViewCVS program also available on Omega's website (take a look!). A guide on how to do all this is in the works, as well.

I hope everyone has a great weekend, it's the last one this summer before the semester starts!

Omega now runs BIND 9.2.1 and is capable of hosting your non-commercial domain name if you are an IIT student. Speaking of hosting stuff, if you'd like a mailing list set up on Omega, just email us! We'll create it and you can start administering your new list right away!

Also, Omega is now connected to the IPv6 backbone! [link 1, link 2] That's right! Omega's global IPv6 address is 2002:d82f:81c2::1 and ip6-omega.aiplanet.com (will only work if your browser supports IPv6) resolves to it (just ask Omega!). So far only the name server is configured for IPv6, but Apache and other programs will soon follow. ping6, traceroute6, and tracepath6 are all available.

The Java 2 SDK 1.4.0-1 is now available in /usr/local/j2sdk1.4.0_01.

Last but not least, Tomcat 4.1.8 (from the Apache Jakarta project) was recently installed. Now you can write your own Java Servlets and JSP pages and run them on Omega!

Have fun!

Other than that, a Users' Websites page now lists all users with a personal website on Omega.