Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 15:17:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: Christopher Patrick Nelson <nelson+@CMU.EDU>
To: Bulletin Board Administration <bb+andrew.hints@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: ANDREW COMPUTER???

> What computer exactly runs the Andrew system?  Where is it located and
> how big physically is it? Am I asking the right questions?

As Rob posted, the Andrew system is mostly just a large collection of
software written at CMU for the purpose of making computing services
available to as many students as possible.  Andrew is designed to be
distributed to individual workstations, rather than running off of one
behemoth machine, and thus makes extensive use of networks.

It consists of the following features:
	AFS:  A distributed file system used to give access to huge
quantities of shared data to workstations around campus and the world
as if the data were on your local hard drive.
	ATK:  A toolkit that facilitates software development around a
standard interface.  ATK is used in EZ, messages, raster, zip, etc.
	AMS:  A message system designed (not entirely successfully) to
process large volumes of personal email and bboard posts quickly and
painlessly.  Integrated into messages, ezmail, MacMail, batmail,
niftymail, etc.

Many of these packages are now used at other universities and in
various departmental computing services as well as in CMU's
general-user Andrew environment.

There are probably more aspects which I have forgotten, but oh well.

I came across the following data from last year which helps to show
the scope of Andrew.  My comments are enclosed in {braces}.

These are the statistics for the week of October 25, 1992 through November 1.
{as compiled by Wallace Colyer for the Computer Expo}

                   Number of Andrew fileservers : 21
{Based on standard workstation boxes with improved IO and without the
spiffy mouse and graphics interfaces.  These fileservers are the
repository of AFS files.}
              Number of kilobytes of AFS storage: 63081441 {63 gigabytes}
                Number of registered Andrew users: 13073
              Number of Andrew users who used account: 7864
     Number of Andrew users who used account since 30 days ago: 8969
              Number of hosts authenticating to Andrew: 955
{These "hosts" are workstations that access AFS.}
               Number of Cross Realm users of Andrew: 406
{Users of Andrew's AFS services from outside of Andrew... mostly from
the CS, ECE, and other CMU AFS realms.}
                     Number of Password Changes: 506
                      Number of PC/Mac Servers: 18
{For augmenting wimpy PC's and Mac's to provide email (via ezmail), etc.}
                 Number of users of PC/Mac Servers: 5718
     Number of users of both PC/Mac Servers and Unix services: 3542
                       Number of Unix Servers: 12
{For augmenting any wimpy computer or off-campus computer to provide
general Andrew services over the network.}
                  Number of users of Unix Servers: 2887
                 Number of logins to Unix Servers: 22550
   Time when Unix Servers have highest number of logins per hour: 4pm
         Highest number of logins per hour on Unix Servers: 1645
                Number of registered Andrew printers: 60
{Both public and private}
                     Number of mail sessions: 48595
                    Number of MacMail sessions: 23365
           Number of Pages printed on central printers: 45737
{I assume he means only Computer Cluster printers here.}
                   Megabytes used by Bboards:  1391.6
                    Megabytes used by Users: 11212.4
             Megabytes used to store system binaries: 8906.7
                   Total number of AFS volumes: 17876
                    Number of Post Office Machines: 5
                      Number of Bboard Machines: 2
                         Number of Bboards: 4872
                    Number of posts processed: 123517
              Number of posts processed in a month: 689624

<cpn
Christopher P. Nelson