Scheduled Conversion Date: Sunday, May 12, 2002

§ Introduction

Three things are going to happen in the near (as we measure time locally) future:

1. The names of the machines will change: June will become Barb and Ward will become Hugh.

2. The hardware base for both will be significantly upgraded -- in ballpark figures the new hardware will be twice as powerful and capacious.

3. The base operating system will change from FreeBSD to Linux.

§ What To Expect While The Transition Is In Progress

• If you have a home directory on june/ward it will be inaccessible.

• No web access to pages living on june/ward file systems.

• MVIS room reservation and visitor schedule information will be unavailable.

• If your mail is delivered to or through june/ward, you will not be able to read it. Note that no mail will be lost, its delivery only be delayed. To determine if you are affected, you can check your email routing.

• Mail to almost all mailing lists will be similarly delayed.

§ Things That Will Be The Same Afterward

However it would be foolish to promise that nobody will notice any differences. In the sections below we point out some changes that you will notice and answer some obvious questions about the transition.

§ Differences You Will Notice

1. Machine names will be different. It is inevitable that the names "june{.cs.washington.edu}" and "ward{.cs.washington.edu}" are lurking in some personal configuration files (e.g, TeraTerm), address books, registry settings, scripts, etc. Once the transfer to Barb/Hugh has been done, those names won't get you where you want to go.

2. The full pathnames to some commands may change. Your problems will be minimal if you use the department's standard shell initialization files. N.B.: If you don't know what the previous sentences mean you can relax -- you are almost certainly using the standard initialization files. If you do know what is being talked about, be advised that the initialization files are in /usr/local/dotfiles/ on Linux machines.

3. If you have personal program binaries compiled for FreeBSD, they will not work under Linux. Now would be a good time to rebuild such programs on any of the Linux compute servers.

4. Linux programs that produce sorted output use a different character collating sequence that is "alphabetic" rather than "ASCII". For instance, if a directory contains files called 'a', 'b', 'C' and 'D' the ls(1) command on Linux produces "a b C D". FreeBSD produces "C D a b". Similarly for running the sort(1) command on a file containing the lines 'a', 'b', 'C' and 'D'.

   You can enable BSD-style behavior by adding the following to you .cshrc file:

   setenv LC_COLLATE C

   For {ba}sh users:

   LC_COLLATE=C; export LC_COLLATE

§ Frequently Asked Questions

» Is This Trip Necessary?

Yes. Moving users from FreeBSD to Linux will considerably simplify system and application software maintenance procedures.

» Why Do The Hostnames Have To Change?

The name "june" and its associated IP address is inextricably entwined with departmental mail routing. And "ward" is inextricably entwined with "june".

» Who The Hell Are "Barb" and "Hugh"?

The actress Barb[ara] Billingsley played June Cleaver in the original TV series "Leave It To Beaver". Ward Cleaver was played by Hugh Beaumont. For efficiency purposes we are maintaining 4 character names.

» Why Not Have A Gradual Migration?

Slowly migrating individual users to new environments has been done in the past. It is an extremely tedious procedure requiring substantial communication overhead and repeated changes to system configuration parameters associated with each user (e.g., mailbox address, home directory name). It is much less confusing and more efficient to move everyone en masse. Also, since the destination environment (Linux) is in common use throughout the department, there is no pressing need to allow a general "acclimatization period".

» I've Got This Program That Has Gotta Run On FreeBSD

For those that have special requirements, access to the "old" June will be available upon request. However, you should regard this access as a transitional aide only. The FreeBSD-side user-level software environment will diverge from other machines over time.

» What Can I Do Now To Prepare?

Most of you are prepared since you use Linux on a regular basis. Thus differences (2)-(4) above will have minimal impact on you. Those of you who do not use Linux should "dip your toe in the water" on any of the existing Linux machines.

The most useful action everyone could take is to check their personal environment for hostname dependencies. A couple of obvious places to look are mentioned in items below.

» I Use TeraTerm To Connect To June/Ward. What Do I Have To Do?

Simply use the Setup menu to add a new connection to barb and/or hugh. You can do this now and make it the default later on.

» I Use ReflectionX/SSH To Start X-Clients on June/Ward. What Do I Have To Do?

Assuming you have followed the ReflectionX/SSH to set up an shortcut on your desktop, you can follow the instructions given at the top of this page to change the host you will connect to and the name of the shortcut.

» After the change, I'm getting "Permission Denied" messages when I use rlogin/rsh/rcp to barb/hugh. What gives?

You are using the "old", un-Kerberized version of these commands. You will have to add:

barb.cs.washington.edu
hugh.cs.washington.edu

to your ~/.rhosts file.

» I Use Emacs (or mail(1)) to read mail and it keeps telling me that I have no new mail. What gives?

You are almost certainly one of the folks whose mail delivery was moved from june to hugh and you are trying to read your mail on barb. Log in to hugh and give it another try.

After May 12, 2002 Send all questions or complaints (as usual) to support@cs