Making the Most of Jedi

A Guide to Configuring Your System to Use the Services Jedi Provides

Compiled by Craig Dewick

This page contains details of how to make the most effective use of the resources available to APANA Sydney members who use this machine (which is operated by me) as their dial-in connection point.

Jedi provides many different services, all of which inter-relate. These services, and how to use them, are detailed in the following sections.

Use the following fast-find index to jump directly to the section you need:

Information about the hardware and software which is used here on Jedi (and other machines on the same local network) can be found here.

Phone Numbers, etc. for the Dial-in Ports

The following table lists all the available dial-in ports along with their phone numbers, PPP suitability, etc.:

Modem # Phone # Port # Max. Bitrate Notes
first 02-9548-0971 0 33k6 bps OnRamp ISDN line
second 02-9548-0972 1 33k6 bps OnRamp ISDN line
third 02-9548-0973 2 33k6 bps OnRamp ISDN line
fourth 02-9548-0974 3 26k4 bps RCM PSTN line
fifth 02-9548-0975 4 26k4 bps RCM PSTN line
sixth 02-9548-0976 5 26k4 bps RCM PSTN line
seventh 02-9520-0028 6 33k6 bps OnRamp ISDN line
eighth 02-9520-0131 7 33k6 bps OnRamp ISDN line

All modems are Netcomm Smartmodems capable of up to 33k6 bps connections, dependent on phone line type, your modem's capabilities, etc. Serial ports are all managed by Magma high-speed serial i/o cards.

Lines listed as 'OnRamp ISDN' are simulated PSTN lines provided by a Telstra OnRamp Home Highway ISDN service. Lines listed as 'RCM PSTN' are regular phone lines which are hooked into the local exchange RCM (R emote Communication Multiplexer).

UUCP logins should work on any port, regardless of the way a particular port is managed by the OS. See the UUCP section for more info.

PPP capabilities vary between MS Windows/NT systems and more traditional Unix-based systems like Linux. The table above indicates which ports require connect scripts to start a PPP session. See the PPP config section for more info.

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General Dial-in Service Guidelines

Shell sessions will automatically terminate if left idle for more than 30 minutes.

Members using PPP to access World-Wide Web servers and other interactive Internet services are reminded to be thoughtful of other members. PPP sessions are restricted to a maximum of 6 hours duration, and idle PPP sessions will automatically terminate after 30 minutes.

Members using UUCP to transfer email and/or news between their machine and here can set up their machines to call at any time since UUCP sessions automatically terminate if there is a protocol error or when all the queued email and/or news is transferred.

Please be courteous to other members and not leave your session idling unnecessarily at times when there are going to be a lot of other people wanting access to Jedi. This applies mostly during the evening when a majority of people want to gain access over our limited number of dial-in ports.

Also note the following special condition:

At no time is it permissible to log into Jedi on more than one dial-in port at the same time.

Any member found to be violating this condition will have their access terminated until a satisfactory agreement is reached between me and the member concerned.

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News and Mail Applications for Shell Users

For people who don't use PPP (or the times when PPP users decide not to), there are some more or less defacto standard news and mail applications to locally read/send news and mail. They are:

If you would like to access your email on Jedi from a remote location, refer to the mail servers section for more info about this.

If you would like to read and post news articles from a remote location, refer to the news server section for more info about this.

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PPP Config Information

Members who wish to use dial-in PPP should read the following info:

Domain Name Server

Jedi runs BIND (the Berkely Internet Name Daemon) from the Internet Software Consortium to manage domain name lookups.

Use the following nameserver settings when you need to configure your system's PPP software:

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World-Wide Web Proxy/Cache Server

Jedi runs the squid Internet object cache server to handle proxy requests from web browsers used by members, as well as request from other sites in the Sydney region running sibling web caches.

The default '.login' script sets up a series of environment variables containing details of proxy settings. These are:

http_proxy
ftp_proxy
gopher_proxy
wais_proxy
no_proxy
All except 'no_proxy' specify the name of the host machine running the proxy server (in this case, it's 'proxy.jedi.apana.org.au'), as well as the port number (8080 is used here). These are all written in HTML like this:

http://proxy.jedi.apana.org.au:8080/
'no_proxy' is a special environment variable which specifies which local sites can be accessed directly without needing to go through a proxy server. In our case, the machines in the default 'no_proxy' list are this one (Jedi) and my personal machine (Lios). It's not written in HTML, but as a comma-seperated list:

jedi,jedi.apana.org.au,lios,lios.apana.org.au
If you use PPP, you may need to configure your web browser accordingly.

Automatic Proxy Server Configuration for Netscape

If you are using Netscape, you can configure it to automatically load the proxy server configuration from Jedi. Perform the following steps (this assumes you're using Netscape version 4.x - later versions might use a different method):

  1. - Bring up the 'Edit' pull-down menu and select 'Preferences'.

  2. - Click on 'Advanced' to expand the list, then select 'Proxies'.

  3. - Click on 'Automatic' and enter the following into the proxy URL field:

    http://proxy.jedi.apana.org.au/proxy.pac

  4. - to Check that it's worked, click on the 'Reload' button and there should be no error messages presented.

Now Netscape should automatically load the proxy server settings directly from the file on Jedi each time it is started!

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News Server

Jedi uses the Inn (Inter-Network News) package from the Internet Software Consortium to manage the local news spool, as well as manage requests for access to the news spool using NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol).

The environment variable 'NNTPSERVER' is set to 'news.jedi.apana.org.au' in the default '.login' script, however PPP users who'd like to read news using their web browsers sometimes need to directly configure the name of the NNTP server for direct web-client-based access to the news server to work.

If you have trouble reading/posting news using NN or Pine directly from your login shell, you might like to try changing the setting of 'NNTPSERVER' to: 

localhost
You can also go and look at the statistics page to see operational statistics for the news server, etc.

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Mail Servers

Jedi provides both POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) servers to manage remote access to local emailboxes.

There are no environment variables required (it's the same as the NNTP server setting anyway), so PPP users will need to configure their web browsers accordingly. Netscape uses POP, and PINE (see below) uses IMAP.

If you need to configure the name of the mailserver, use 'mail.jedi.apana.org.au'.

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Disk Quota Limits

To ensure that there is always enough disk space available for all members to use, disk quota limits are imposed which limit the ammount of disk space your files can use up in certain filesystems.

There are two types of quota limit - the hard limit which is the absolute ammount of diskspace you are allowed to use in a certain filesystem, and the soft limit, which is the maximum ammount you are normally allowed to use, but this can be temporarily exceeded up to the hard limit for short periods (around 7 days).

The quota limits are:

If you exceed the soft limit, you will be continually warned that the limit has been exceeded, and some applications, such as the POP mail server, will refuse you access to your mailbox.

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Personal Web Pages

To enable your account to support your own web pages, create a sub-directory under your home directory called 'public_html' by typing the following at a shell prompt:

mkdir public_html
Create a file called 'home.html' to be your home page. You can create one from scratch using a text editor, or you might like to start off with a basic skeletal home page and add to it from there.

Next, create a symbolic link to it by typing the following at the shell prompt:

ln -s home.html index.html
which will enable anyone wanting to look at your home page to refer to it like this:

http://www.jedi.apana.org.au/~your_login_name
Make sure you include the 'www' part when accessing your pages, and remember to check that any external references to your web pages on Jedi (such as submissions to search engines) include it as well so other people are able to view your web material.

You can create as many other web pages as you like as long as you don't exceed your disk quota limit.

There is a web counter CGI installed which you can use to count the number of hits each of your web pages receives.

The simplest way to use the counter is to insert something like this in a page you want to keep track of, as well as display the counter image:

This page has been read <img align=middle
src="http://www.jedi.apana.org.au/cgi-bin/nph-count?link=http://www.jedi.apana.org.au/members/config.html">
times!<p>

This will produce something like this:

This page has been read times!

For each page you want to count, modify the 'link' argument to be the actual URL of that page. This is used by the counter to identify the particular page you're counting for.

Note: I have another, much better web counter installed, but at the moment I cannot work out the right way to set up file access permissions for it's database, so the old one (detailed above) is the only one you can use for your own pages at this time, unless of course you use a counter external to our local network (which isn't recommended).

Australian Search Engines

To increase the visibility of your web pages to other Internet users, you should submit the URL(s) of your home page and any other key pages to a few different search engines.

The following are some Australian search engines that you can submit URL's to:


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UUCP

As an alternative to shell/PPP, Jedi also provides a UUCP (Unix to Unix CoPy) store-and-forward service to anyone who would like to use it to connect their machines to the APANA Sydney network for email and news, but not log in for extended periods as with a shell/PPP session.

Jedi uses the Taylor UUCP software package written by Ian Lance Taylor. I have made the documentation available online if you're interested in reading up on the technical side of UUCP.

If you are interested in establishing a UUCP feed, please email me so we can discuss what needs to be done.

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If you have any questions, please send me some email. If this link doesn't work for you, my email address is 'craig@jedi.apana.org.au'.

back to the Jedi Member Support page