SLAC WWW-Tech Mtg 12/10/97

Attendees: Tony Johnson, Les Cottrell,  John Halperin,  Joan Winters, Dennis Wisinski, Bebo White, Paul Raines, Charlotte Hee, John Halperin, Pat Kreitz, Dennis Wisinski.

Agenda:

Web Server Comparisons - Bebo

Bebo has made a comparison of how Netscape & Apache meets SLAC's requirements, plus the features for each server. Both servers met most of the requirements and come out about equal in terms of features (depending on how one weights the features). For more information see http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/bebo/unixweb.htm.

Bebo's recommendation is to adopt the Netscape server mainly based on the easier administration.
It looks like HyperNews may not run on Netscape, but Paul Raines (HyperNews maintainer) could, and is prepared  to, run HyperNews on a separate Apache server. A second limitation of Netscape is the lack of Java servlets support. Tony is the proponent for this and can continue to develop such things on the Microsoft IIS server. Also Bebo hopes/expects that Netscape will support servlets in the future. A decision is needed before Bebo can focus his efforts on a single server. The attendees agreed they were willing to go along with Bebo's recommendation. Paul had a reservation that he wanted to be sure this would not exclude an Apache server for HyperNews, which he would support, but expect SCS admin support for the operating system and the hardware. It was proposed that the backup server (running on Solaris) would run Apache/HyperNews as well as the backup Netscape server. This was agreed to.

A poll of the attendees gave 3 each for Netscape and Apache, with 5 abstentions.

Web Server Registration Documentation

We need links to the Web pages telling how to get a Web server registered.  Les put links to the pages into the SLAC Web Security Policy page.  The links currently are to pages saved on www-sldnt which is not a central server.  The pages were stored there due to the functionality of the www-sldnt server.  This functionality is now available on the central NT Web server. Tony agreed to migrate the registration pages to the WWW NT server. Joan wants to look at where to install links to these registration servers.

Log File Archiving

There has not been much activity on this subject since the last WWW-Tech meeting. The intent will be to copy each day's log files from WWW1 to AFS.  Then the availability of the logs in AFS will provide the required access. It is not clear how long the raw logs will be kept in AFS space.

WWW6Conf Status

This server has been blocked, the replacement server should be available at Stanford before Xmas. there have been about 4-6 inquiries as to what happened to the server.

Harvest

The SCS Web group is looking at a replacement  for Harvest which is a stagnant technology.

Announcements

We expect to have a site license for Meeting maker in the near future.

Les Cottrell