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Technical Details

Last updated: 12 May, 2001

The aim is that this system will shortly be ported to a server at USP. For the moment, PacLII is running as a virtual interface on the main AustLII production server (called "bar").

Hardware

bar: The main AustLII server at www.austlii.edu.au (known internally as "bar") is a Sun Enterprise 4501 server, with four 450 MHz CPUs, 3 Gb main memory and two RAID arrays connected via fibre optic and SCSI interfaces. It is connected to the main router via 100 Mb full duplex link and from there via UTS to the NSW Regional Network. It has tape robot for backups and other groovy stuff.

oldbar: An unoriginally named full backup server. This is a Sun Enterprise 3000 with two 300 MHz processors and 1G of memory. Ordinarily this just mirrors bar and picks up some of the load, but when things are bad we all love this machine :-)

bondi, bronte, wanda: Two secondary servers (mail.austlii.edu.au aka "bondi" and beta.austlii.edu.au aka "bronte") handle mail, DNS and other services and also act as "workhorses" for document conversion, development and other tasks. They are both single-CPU Sun UltraSPARC 1's with 512 Mb main memory each and about 20 Gb disk space. A third server (a Sun SPARC 4) runs all virtual servers in addition to some public FTP mirrors.

others: A couple of Sun UltraSPARC 5's act as development and testing machines for new software considered too unstable for "beta". These machines, as well as two more Sun SPARC 4's also act as personal workstations. AustLII staff run a mixture of PC (Windows 98, Windows NT, Linux) and Apples (MacOS 8) as personal workstations.

the beach thing: almost all AustLII machines are named after Australian beaches (yes, even "bar" and "wineglass"). A tradition from 1996 reflecting where we'd all rather be...

Software

OS: The main servers run Sun's Solaris (a UNIX operating system) however we have begun experimenting with Linux for SPARCs on some hardware. Personal workstations run a mix of Windows, MacOS, Redhat Linux (and once upon a time, OS/2 Warp and BeOS).

security: various network monitoring and control, as well as OS-level software, including SATAN, COPS, Tripwire, ASET, TCP Wrappers. Additional custom software developed here at AustLII.

servers: The main web server is Apache, with numerous modifications including mod_perl, Mason, FastCGI and some modules developed in-house. Mail lists managed with majordomo. Public FTP services handled by NcFTPd. LDAP handled by OpenLDAP.

browsers: Netscape Communicator, MS Internet Explorer, Opera, IBM WebExplorer, Lynx and numerous more "exotic" browsers.

search: Our in-house SINO search software handles all search functionality across the site. Remote indexing managed by Gromit (also developed here). Document management of World Law index handled by Anarchivist (aka "Feathers II").

stuff: We couldn't get by without Perl, (including PerlTK, Mason, mod_perl, LWP, libnet) GNU C/C++, Linux, FreeBSD (and the *BSD family!), OpenLDAP, Berkeley DB, and a host of other freely distributed software.