FNAL - in Tim's US trip '92

# At FNAL

## On-Line Support

(This is the rough equivalent of the CERN ECP/DS group.) Within OLS, Don Petravik leads the on-line software group. He feels strongly about good documentation, having written is own and spent some time indexing it. He sees the availability of W3 clients as a strong incentive to start producing online documents in hypertext form. Currently documents are not on-line, and are produced by a number of differents word processors.

The other groups within OLS are Data Aquisition Hardware and DA Software. Johnathan Streets in DA software put up a W3 server for the exitsing VMS-based "DOC-DB" system. This is a VMS server which looks at a flat file database -- in fact a set of flat files generated from a "proper" database (Datatrieve?). The server is written in VAX/DCL which was quick to write is sometimes slow to run when it has to parse a parge file. A small C server based on our skeleton server daemon which calls the DCL command file. This seemed to me to be a useful utility which should be generally available, so I have put the basic DCLServer code into our source tree. The server is not yet continuously available. It contains notes on OLS-supported software, hardware for data acquisitiom, and internal OLS notes. Ruth Pordes provided a lot on encouragement to get this service running. It took a long afternoon.

## ACCESS

Judy Nichols heads the ACCESS Liason Group, which provides consultancy for experiments.

Janet Weber understands W3 well. She had already got the clients running before I came, and after watching Gary and me set up a HEPNET server, she made her own.

Farhad Abar-L is enthusiastic about W3. The group discussed the possible W3 support which they could provide within FNAL. There was serious concern about support levels from W3 developes outside FNAL (Why no Viola port to SGI?)

The port of Viola to the SGI will be a test case. If it can be done easily or Pei comes up with the goods, it will be taken as a good omen. FNAL has more SGI machines than anything else.

## Physics Analysis Tools Group

Art Keymer was the author of one of the long series of news schemes which FNAL use and are using. Art is a VMS enthusiast and now has www for VMS. He suggests a Viola port would be a good move.

Lynn Garren has a VMS machine with a color display which seems to fox Viola ... it complains "failed to allocate color 'yellow'" and loops! Lynn also is onvolved with CERNLIB support and ffels it is getting unwieldly in its size, though she wasn't sure whether fragmentation would improve it.

John Marrafino gets the CERNLIB distribution on arrival at FNAL, and is concerned that the releases have recently lost their cleanliness. He puts it down to the decoupling of CNL releases and CERNLIB releases, removing the hard deadline from CERNLIB releases. Whatever the reason, he has found that things have been released piecemeal, with fixes following, rather than in one neat lump.

TBC...

## HEPNet

Dave Martin and Gary Roediger picked up the W3 code and I helped them install a server. Dave is the hep.net contact person in the DDN NIC's whois database. (How about a W3-whois gateway, someone?)

## The Library Automation project

Paula Garret is in charge of this, with John also working on it, and the inimitable Dave Ritchie acting as "technical consultant". They decided about 4 years ago to go with Data Research Associates (DRA) for their library system. These guys seemed to klnow about networking. They are rather VMS and Decnet oriented. FNAL have all the packages of the DRA product up except the serials. They have commissioned DRA to rwite code to import the SLAC preprint data.

Dave sees image viewing as important and DRA have some experience in that area, all very DEC-specific. He feels FNAL needs to fulfil government "record management" requirements for email traffic for example. An email archiver and manager seems a useful project of general use and one which we all need (especially those whose mail accumulates while they go on trips!).

A W3 gateway for the library might be quite easy (write it in DCL?). Would DRA be interested?

## D0

A quick trip to D0 allowed me to show W3 to Herbert Greenlee and Adam Para. The now have a server running with some plain text files. They really need Viola for Sillicon Graphics as SGI is all they have. The Daemon (0.4) compiled for SGI no problem. (Note SGI has inetd.conf in /usr/etc not /etc, for the documentation). They would like runoff to html converters and/or vice-versa.

## Theory

The theory guys have lots of NeXTs. They used to use W3 just for SPIRES access, but now they have their own server which serves the upcomming seminar list.

## Conclusion

There was strong interest all over Fermilab -- now we have to see whether W3 will get central coordination by the Computing Division, or will have to be an uncoordinated "grass roots" effort.

There was a suggestion that Fermilab now has more W3 servers than CERN but I'm not going to count... :-)