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About Our Server Technology
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One goal of the Testbed is to support Network Science by developing technology that is suitable for use by school systems or small projects. To do this, we chose a platform that we felt would be reliable, feature rich, and easy to manage. Rather than develop a wide variety of custom software, we chose "shrink-wrapped", professionally developed products that could be integrated to form a cohesive whole. Where necessary, we developed scripts and programs to provide the "glue" and to implement functions where there was no commercial counterpart. Another goal was to keep the cost of the entire system, and the cost of maintenance at a reasonable level.
The system software that we chose was Windows-NT 3.51 from Microsoft. Our actual hardware is fairly modest. We are using a Dell OptiPLEX466/LV with 32Meg of RAM, and 1Gig of diskspace. Due to the database intensive nature of the server, a Pentium would be preferred. The software consists of: WebSite Web Server software from O'Reilly & Associates to provide the basis for our Web environment. Almost all transactions on the system occur through the Website software. It serves up Web pages, and interacts with three other servers (WebBoard, ColdFusion and Data Turnaround) to provide a consistant entry point to a variety of functions. WebBoard, also published by O'Reilly for our Web-based conferencing system. This is similar to a traditional on-line BBS, but with interesting enhancements. Custom software, CGI scripts, and ColdFusion all interact with a Microsoft Access database to generate dynamic pages and tables of student provided data. ColdFusion is a CGI program that processes DBML (database markup language) scripts to provide datasharing and dynamic pages of information. Our Data Turnaround System consists of WinSMTP and custom software to interface with the above mentioned software. The Data Turnaround program takes incoming mail messages from the Internet and turns the requests into ColdFusion transactions to the same databases that Web users access. This provides backwards compatability with the popular Alice Network Software, and a datasharing point of entry for email-only users. For further information, contact the Teaparty Server Administrator: teaparty-admin@teaparty.terc.edu |