SLAC WWW-Tech Mtg 1/8/97

Attendees: Tony Johnson, Les Cottrell, Dennis Wisnski, Edgar Whipple, Laurie Gennari, Paul Raines, Charlotte Hee

Agenda:

Update on CERN Server

The SLAC WWW server has been updated to the final (3.0a) version of the CERN server. There is not much obviously changed. There may be some improvements in customizing error messages.

Netscape Server Update

Edgar hopes to start on this next week, he will pul over the latest versions of the Netscape proxy server and whatever other server looks good. It will run under the Sloaris OS on web-beta.

Netscape Browser Update

Tony has made Netscape 3.01 and Netscape 3.01 Gold the standard netscape and netscape-gold versions. Len Moss helped in getting them to work on AIX 4.1.

Netscape 4.0 beta is available only for Windows 95 and Windows NT. The main change is to separate the mail, news etc. servers. The Netscape mail client now supports IMAP. Teresa has an IMAP server (believed to be from Univ of Wash) in test. Tony thinks Netscape 4.0 client is very buggy. It may be useful to compare the UW IMAP server with the Netscape IMAP server. Such a server will needs lots of disk space to hold all the mailboxes.

Alta Vista Forum

This has been purchased and as of 20 minutes before the meeting has been installed and is running at http://athena/forums/aca-1/dispatch.exe. We will need an alias name maybe something of the form forums.slac.stanford.edu. Dennis Wisinski is the initial point person for questions. Paul Raines is interested in experimenting with forums for the BaBar folks, especially with respect to how to migrate from Hypernews to AVF.

Access by Offsite people to Preprints

Harv Galic has requested to make these accessible more directly from the Web since the current mechanism (via a CGI script) has problems (too long URLs with some browsers). Laurie raised an issue about some files needing protection until they have been blessed by the patent officer. It would be easy to put a link into the file space from the httpd configuration file. This will need blessing by the "registrar" (Joan Winters). Tony will make a request to Joan to put a link in the top level http file space to the preprints area. Tony will also request a holding space for the pre patent approval files.

Access by offsite people to SLACONLY stuff

This was raised by a request from the DOE people on the SLAC site to be able to view their ES&H training records, the SLAC phone book etc. The DOE onsite machines are currently on a separate subnet and so cannot see SLACONLY stuff. Technically we could make SLACONLY also mean the DOE subnet, however this chaneges retroactively the meaning of SLACONLY so some of the owners of some of the stuff put out there under SLACONLY may not be happy. The issue will be discussed at the AD meeting on Friday 17th January.

Remedy Action Request System

Edgar has got a copy of this, and will be installing in the near future. People who have problem tracking needs (e.g. CATER, Gnats, STARtrak, users/supporters) may be interested in the Remedy's system. They have Web interfaces out of the box.
Les Cottrell