Ariel is the name of a mischievous sprite in The Tempest by William Shakespeare. It is also: the 12th closest satellite of the planet Uranus; a variety of Arabian gazelle; a squirrel-like Australian marsupial; a Brazillian toucan; and a biblical name meaning "the lion of God".
The machine ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au provides general interactive unix logins for University members. It also provides these services:
Users with ariel accounts are able to host personal home pages on the system.
To enable this you must make a sub-directory of your home directory named public_html.
$ mkdir $HOME/public_html
Files placed inside this directory are then accessible via a URL like:
http://ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au/~username/filename.html
You will need to make sure your file permissions are set to allow everyone read access, and your directory permissions are set to allow everyone execute access.
$ chmod o+x $HOME $HOME/public_html
$ chmod o+r $HOME $HOME/public_html/*
A file named index.html is searched for in a directory and served up for URLs ending in a slash.
In July 2004 ariel had its operating system upgraded to Solaris 8 from Solaris 2.6 which it had been using since 1999. At the same time it was migrated to new hardware: a Sun V240 server with 2 CPUs and 2GB of memory.
As a result of the upgrade some changes were made to the system, and some rarely or unused software was decomissioned. Below is a list of changes in the environment for ariel users.
Note that most software under /usr/local is unsupported.
The following software has been moved to new locations.
Ariel now delivers your e-mail into your home directory. Your inbox is now $HOME/.mail instead of /var/mail/username.
Do not delete the .mail file in your home directory.
The MAIL environment variable is automatically set to reflect this change.
If you have custom delivery rules in your .procmailrc you may need to update them.
You can no longer use ariel as the "outgoing mail server" or "smtp server" in your mail client software. Instead you will need to use the university standard smtp.unimelb.edu.au.
The University is phasing out the AppleTalk protocol and ariel no longer supports it. You can still access your home areas via AppleShare over TCP/IP by connecting your Macintosh directly to ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au.
The lpr printing system has been replaced with a more lightweight and flexible alternative, rlpr.
You can now print to any printer that supports the LPR protocol anywhere in the world directly by giving the printer name as queuename@host, rather than having to have each queue registered locally.
E.g., lpr -P raw@myprinter.its.unimelb.edu.au
You will need to change your settings to print to the previously configured printers, as follows:
You may need to change the setting of your PRINTER environment variable appropriately. The rlpr(1) man page has more detailed information.
The web server software used to serve personal pages has been upgraded to Apache 2. This shouldn't have any noticable effect on the operation of your web pages.
At the moment PHP support is not available. This may be revisited in the future as needs change.