What had happened to the CityU Web Server?

 

Annie Yu

On 23 October 1996, our CityU Web Server was moved from Sparc20 to the Ultra Enterprise 6000, the fastest network server on campus. The latter machine is equipped with multiple UltraSPARC CPUs, 768 MB of physical memory and has been configured with 1.5 gigabyte of virtual memory. If you are a Web user of CityU, you may notice a vast difference in performance when accessing web pages on this powerful machine. This improvement is obvious, but what about those that are not so obvious? The points below are the advantages of having the Web Server on the Ultra E6000:

1. Better performance in terms of process allocations and speed of downloading web pages when accessing the CityU Web Server.

2. Large storage capacity for future growth of web page accounts.

3. Built-in redundancy can tolerate power, cooling or storage failures without affecting system operations and can recover from most other failures such as CPU faults with minimal disruption.

4. With the use of disk mirroring technique on the Ultra E6000, data reliability is improved. This implies that in the event of a disk crash, a back up is readily available within a short period.

5. The Ultra E6000 allows expansion for future development such as web database applications.
   

Along with the change-server process, we have also installed a new Web counter for counting the number of hits on a particular web page. Effective on 16 October 1996, the old Server Side Include Executable based Web Counter was disabled and the new Web counter can be obtained by applying through a CGI program on the Web. The procedure is straightforward. Simply type the url http://www.cityu.edu.hk/cgi-bin/ApplyCounter.cgi in Netscape. Complete the url of the appropriate web page by typing over "Reference Name". Once submitted, the program will produce a macro statement which you may insert into the desired web page.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk