Unlike many development groups, the Site Lab also selects and maintains the hardware and server systems used to deploy web and related services. This gives us additional insight into the end-to-end delivery of content and allows us to build applications and sites which will easily scale to very high usage situations. It also allow for the co-ordination of resource allocation and planning.
In all the Site Lab directly supports 12 production servers, and 3 development servers.
This, of course, includes the 'main' campus web server www.uky.edu, as well as the student web and file sharing system netblue, a Web Calendar Server, UK News, various other support servers, and our own development server.
For assistanc with www.uky.edu, please contact the UK Webmaster list directly.
Hardware
Most of our servers are now Apple XServes, connected to a shared network filesystem (XSAN) providing a reliable, configurable, high-performance backing store for various applications and services.
At the time of this writing the 'main' httpd server is a dual AMD opteron system running FreeBSD 5.5x. This system typically serves between 5 and 9 million 'hits' per day, as well as accomodating updates and changes (via sftp/ssh/scp) by over 1000 users around campus.
The web access logs alone on www.uky.edu can exceed 1.5G per day in size!
System Administration
Unix provides a scalable, secure and reliable platform for deploying a range of services, and is the defacto standard for web services across the internet.
Mac OS X, retains a Unix based operating system, but provides easy connections to other services such as Microsoft's Active Directory and Novell's eDirectory. Both are used at UK, and are jointly called 'link blue.'
A sampling of the software packages and services we use and support:
- FreeBSD Versions 5, 6, and 7.
- OS X Server Versions 10.4.X and 10.5.x
- Apache Versions 1, 2, 2.2, etc.
- PHP Versions 4.x, 5.X
- Smarty Templates most versions