Introduction

Sometimes when authoring personal web pages at home, it is not possible to lodge them on the Internet Service Providers homepages server or on other occasions, one receives a message that 'the server is unavailable' when trying to access a particular web site. These problems are usually caused by failure of server side hardware or software and are the responsibility of the service provider to fix, most people need worry only about the appearance of their web pages, not about how they are displayed.

Whilst working upon their project, the author experienced all of the colours of the Intranet spectrum, sever maintenance included, it is a task not to be taken lightly since people are relying on you to make sure that things are running smoothly.

In dealing with the Internet at this level, one is responsible for the running of the server side of software, if you are providing a web service then installation of appropriate web server software is necessary, the same goes for e-mail and news type software too.

The following discussion pertains to the implementation of WWW and news services on the D2D Intranet as experienced by the author.

It should be noted that these services were run off a physical server powered by an Intel Pentium 586 processor using 32 MB of RAM, physical storage was provided by a 1 GB hard disk and a DAT device was used to back-up the (valuable) data held on the hard drive.

Depending on what computer and operating system is being used, there are a variety of choices available when it comes to WWW server software [46] though until relatively recently, one may well have been limited to using a UNIX server system, now there are applications available for most operating systems. The following table summarises these.

Since the computer system of use at D2D was PC based, it is hardly surprising that a Microsoft operating system was being used to power the server, Windows NT 4.0 being initially used. Microsoft offer an enticement to buy this system by making a lot of their related Internet / Intranet software freely downloadable, though of course NT is not a cheap choice of OS. Whilst this sort of 'proprietary lock-in' is not necessarily the best thing, it does have the benefit of giving the user the option of having software which is in theory 'seamless' in its operation as even something as relatively complex as the web server was still controlled from the familiar Microsoft windows type interface, a luxury not afforded to UNIX users [32a], [32b].

The following diagram illustrates the hierarchy of services available when running Windows NT 4.0, those highlighted in red were used in the authoring of pages featured in this document.

It would have been possible to have used the news server provided within the Windows NT environment, however, this does not support the NNTP protocol. To circumvent this, a trial version of the DNEWS [47] news server was downloaded and installed Whilst DNEWS is undoubtedly a better news server to use, one is reminded when using it of the advantages of using Microsoft's seamless windowed applications. DNEWS runs according to parameters recorded in a number of settings files, just one of which, 'DNEWS.INI' is partially reproduced below by means of example, the address corresponds to that of the D2D Intranet server.

As news administrator, one takes on board responsibility for such matters as deciding what groups can and can't be set up, who has access to them and at what level i.e. to be able to read or add to them. There is also the matter of how long the postings can last, news on Demon has reportedly come in at the rate of ca. 610,000 articles a day, so one has to let the news 'expire' after a period of time. Finally of course, one has to ensure that the service is running smoothly all of the time.

As has been previously mentioned, the buck stops with the administrator when things go wrong. Even the 'seamlessness' of Microsoft products does not always hold, it is a fact that IIS, NT and the like all work in conjunction with one another but the set-up is not infallible. A persistent set of crashes permeated the use of this particular software, such events necessitated the re-starting of the server which was time consuming and not satisfactory since there can be no guarantee that personnel will always be around to do this.

It is the opinion of the author that the crashes were to due a clash between the network operating system, NT and the Front Page extensions which were installed as part of the server suite, although this was difficult to prove.

Although the net effect of such crashes was little more than inconvenience, it would be interesting to see what would happen if one was to be in a situation of dependency on the company Intranet. Such incidents serve as a reminder that the increasing reliance of companies on IT places them at the mercy of the quality and robustness of the computer systems that they introduce.