the Configured Workstations are Intel-compatible 32-bit i386 hardware running Ubuntu GNU/Linux, release 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), with the Required Astronomical Software installed on them, with several CAL filesystems mounted via NFS.

For information about what specifically is supported, please see Configured Workstations/Policy.

Authentication Model

The workstations use PAM to authenticate against the CAL Kerberos Domain

Partitioning Scheme

CWs use LVM. here's the basic partitioning scheme:

Base disk is broken into two partitions:

• /dev/sda1 is a small (200MB) partition for /boot
• /dev/sda2 is everything else, and will be a physical volume (the only physical volume in the primary volume group for the machine)

The primary volume group will have these logical volumes:

• root is a ~1GB volume mounted at /
• usr is a ~4GB volume mounted at /usr
• var is a ~4GB volume mounted at /var
• swap is a ~1GB volume used for swap space
• the rest will be mounted as a scratch partition somewhere reasonable (like /usr/local/scratch)

temporary space

/tmp is mounted as a tmpfs (a RAM-backed filesystem). Since all RAM is actually backed by swap, this is reasonable from an efficiency viewpoint, and it means that /tmp will be nicely auto-flushed on a reboot. An example line in /etc/fstab for such a method looks like this:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=300m,mode=1777,nosuid,nodev 0   0

installation process

dkg's notes about the installation process for a configured workstation are at Configured Workstation Installation