Free university of michigan software for linux

Boston University Linux is based on Fedora Core Linux, but specifically tailored for the BU environment.

Weve added security updates, made modifications to make software work better with the way things are set up here, and added some applications that we think you might like to have.

The server edition of BU Linux provides a modern, stable, and robust server platform suitable for long-term deployment in many roles throughout the university.

Supported Hardware

Currently, only i686-class machines are supported. This includes almost everything from Intels Pentium Pro on. AMD64 and Intel EM64T systems will work fine using their 32-bit mode. Watch for a 64-bit version later this summer.

Specific Notes on Server Applications

Mail Server:

BU Linux 4.5 Server Edition (Zodiac) includes three different choices of Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) for your mail server. Each of these open source servers has its unique strengths, and you can install one or more and use the utility system-switch-mail to choose which is active.

The default is IBMs Postfix, which is designed from scratch to be secure and easily configurable. On a newly-installed BU Linux machine, Postfix is configured to exchange mail on the local machine and to send mail out to other systems, but not receive mail from the network. For this reason, outgoing mail from global BU accounts (those matching valid BU login names and with the proper UID) will appear to come from @bu.edu rather than @hostname.bu.edu. Local users (including system accounts) will retain the hostname, but without reconfiguration, any replies will bounce. Changing the system to accept mail is easy; see the BU Linux web site for details.

For the maximum flexibility and for compatibility with existing configurations (and with existing expertise), we also include the traditional standard Sendmail. And, if you have particular special needs, you may find that the new Exim MTA fits your situation best.

No matter which MTA you choose, please contact us if you need any assistance. With so many options available, the situation can be confusing, and its unfortunately easy for an accidentally misconfigured system to become a target for spam relayers. We have significant expertise at configuring both Postfix and Sendmail in a variety of situations, and will be glad to help.

FTP Server:

This release of BU Linux provides two options for FTP. The first is vsftpd, which is designed to be simple and secure. This is the most appropriate for almost all situations, but if you require more power and flexibility, we also include ProFTPd, which has many more options and a configuration syntax similar to that of the Apache web server.

Please also remember that FTP is an insecure protocol and that any passwords used travel over the network in plain text. For this reason, its best to avoid anything but anonymous FTP. For user-authenticated file transfer, use SSH and SFTP. (SFTP is provided by the OpenSSH server and enabled by default.)

Web Server:

The web server software included in BU Linux is the industry-standard Apache httpd. We also include PHP 4.3 and many other useful tools for building a web server.
If you need to provide authenticated access to web services to BU users, please contact us and we will provide you with our University-standard Weblogin module. This provides a powerful and flexible means of single-signon access control for the BU user community and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to provide this for your users.

Database Server:

BU Linux includes MySQL 4.1 and PostgreSQL 7.4. For less demanding SQL applications, we also provide SQLite 3, which provides simple SQL databases without the management overhead of running a SQL server.

Funiter (short for function iteration) is an application developed for educational purposes as a laboratory, generating graphs of several types for iteration of real and complex functions, with comfortable switching between related types of graphs.

Funiter was originally developed in the context of courses at the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands) for highschool students with a special interest in beta-studies.

Coursor project is a Web application for academic environments.
Coursor is a Web-based academic course system for assigning students to university courses.
It has an evolutionary algorithm for assigning students to the courses they requested. This algorithm tries to find an optimal distribution of students to existing courses while taking their preferences into account.
The system supports multiple roles for users: Admin, Student, Teacher/Prof, or Tutor.
A user can also have multiple roles.
It supports international localization, currently in English, German, French, Russian, and Arabic
Main features:
- Browser independent usage for students, teachers and admins alike (no frames, no necessary JavaScript, no cookies).
- Platform independent (entirely written in JAVA).
- Runs on APACHE Tomcat and uses a Postgresql Database.
- Evolutionary Algorithm to assign students to courses.
- Multiple Roles: Administrator, Teacher/Prof, Tutor and Student. One person can have multiple roles.
Enhancements:
- Encoding for Russian fixed
- PropertyEditor (propEdit.sf.net) programmed, will be released as own package. Eases Tranlation a lot.
- I18N target in build.xml starts PropertyEditor
- Serializable classes with ID (Eclipse wanted that)

Jungle Monkey (JM) is a distributed file sharing program. Users join channels where they receive announcements for available resources. These resources may include files, chat groups, search groups, and other channels.

Users can send announcements for their own file and for chat groups, search groups, and channels they create. JM is for Unix only. There may be a Windows port someday. See the Information section for more information.

Jungle Monkey is part of a research project at the EECS Department of the University of Michigan. Were looking at end-host multicast, distributed keyword search, and distributed data structures. The lead developer is David Helder, a PhD student at U of M.

owl is a program to display electronic dictionaries. It uses the extensive markup language dicML.
Two dictionaries are currently available with this program: a huge English/German dictionary originally published by Technical University of Chemnitz, and a French/German dictionary written from scratch for dicML and therefore not as big as the first one.
Main features:
- support of the whole dicML standard
- available for all important operating systems
- user interface in English, German and French
- possibility to print
- for free and open source

Ups is a source level C,C++ and Fortran debugger that runs under X11. Currently supported systems are FreeBSD and GNU/Linux on Intel x86 and Solaris on SPARC.

On these systems it runs native; it is not a front-end to GNU gdb. An ANSI C interpreter is included; this is built in to ups to provide conditional debugging and can also be built as a seperate program.

If you are using some other operating system or processor then please see the systems information as ups has in the past been ported to a variety of computers, and may include code for your system.

Ups was written by Mark Russell of the Computer Science department at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and was originally part of the Kent Software Tools suite.

nefu (network fidelity utility) is a Unix daemon that monitors services over the network. Natively-monitored protocols include ICMP echo (ping), SSH, IPP, DNS, HTTP, POP, NTP, IMAP, SMTP, and LDAP, as well as having facilities to execute external programs. Status pages are available via finger or the Web.
nefu monitors network services and reports eventual failures. Working from a discription of the network topography, nefus algorithm prevents "false alarms" in the event of a network outage due to a dependency failure.
nefu is in production use at the University of Michigan, monitoring more than 250 servers (among which are U-Ms IMAP, WWW, and LDAP Directory servers) and a variety of other systems. nefu is available under a BSD-style license.
Enhancements:
- Improved TDK: documentation, portability, examples.
- SMTP test says HELO
- Thanks to Joel Brogniart