In the Main Building Alpha Laboratory annex and First Year study areas, Physics Information Technology Support installed 18 new eMacs running Mac OS Panther. Additionally, 48 existing iMacs in the Alpha Laboratory that once ran Mac OS Classic have been upgraded to also run Panther. Legacy Mac OS Classic software was upgraded to the most recent Mac OS versions, and the latest Microsoft Office suite was installed on all Macintoshes. These changes provide a more engaging, stable and homogenous computing environment for students while enabling fine-grained administrative control and automation.

On the management front, the First Year Laboratory server computer has been upgraded to the latest Mac OS server operating system. Account replication and network fail-over to a secondary server creates robustness. Software updates and application overlays are regularly deployed automatically over the network to each Macintosh without human intervention. To speed new workstation deployment, a standard operating environment can be sent over the network to Macintoshes, thus obviating manual operating system installation.

A new tape backup library with a compressed capacity of approximately 1.6 terabytes has been deployed to backup our core workstations and servers. This tape unit facilitates long-term archiving that was not possible using the previous hardware. User files on the undergraduate and general-purpose workstations are now stored on a disk area that can survive a hard disk crash without affecting workstation operation. Critical data such as user files and mail is mirrored to a disk staging area that stores multiple differential copies. In addition to creating several safety layers to protect user data, this mirroring scheme increases the likelihood that data can be recovered in a timely manner.

Kristien Clayton and David Jonas