NEOS Server FAQ

Installing the Server

Server Questions

• Do you want WWW access to your server?
  Answer yes, by typing 1.

• Do you want E-mail access to your server?
  At first answer no, the default.

• Would you like to customize your server?
  At first answer no, the default.
  Later you can add links to user feedback pages,
  add Web statistics if you run Analog on the Web server,
  experiment with Corba...
  • Do you want Corba access to your server?
    This is highly experimental. Answer no, the default.

  • Are you installing the Kestrel Server along with this Server?
    Also, experimental. Answer no. If you are interested in obtaining the Kestrel Server, you can contact us at . Be warned that the Kestrel Server may not be in a state that we are ready to share.

  • Do you want Analog analysis of your web server?
    If your Web server gathers stats with Analog,
    you can add links to view stats for the NEOS Server pages.

  • Would you like to add a page of user feedback received?
    Adds a link on the User Feedback page to a page with positive comments from users. Place the comments in an html file called stories.html under server-/server/lib/html/.

• Enter the absolute hostname of your machine
  This is the name of the machine that will run the Server.

• What user is installing the Server?
  The user name of the owner of the server files.

• What is the home of the Server?
  This is the root directory for the Server files. The config directory should be a subdirectory.

• Where should variable-length files be placed?
  Depending on how much use your Server sees, you may need a lot of disk storage for this directory. The NEOS Server stores all incoming jobs and results, logs, databases, and solver registration information here along with other files that change in the course of Server operation. Create the directory in a place accessible to your Server, and give the full path here.

• Who is the Server administrator?
  This is the user(s) in charge of administration.

• Where should user comments be sent?
  This is the user(s) in charge of user comments.

• What is the name of your Server?
  You can use any name you want, for example, NEOS (NWU)

• What is the port number for the Server?
  You can use any available port. Port 3333 is generally free.
  Ports in the range [0, 1023] are reserved for root.

• What is the email address for email submissions?
  This is the email address responsible for email submissions. Any messages sent here will be submitted to the server.

• What is the POP3 mail server?
  Ask the system administrator. If you do not use pop mail service, some of the include statements in the initializer, receiver, and configure scripts will need to be changed.

• Where should the Server web pages be placed?
  The Web-accessible location created initially.

• What is the base URL for the Server?
  This is the URL (web address) for where the Server pages are located.

• Where should the Server cgi scripts be placed?
  Use the cgi-bin directory that was created initially.

• What is the base URL to the cgi area?
  This is the URL for where the cgi scripts are located.

• What is the absolute path to perl on your Web server machine?
  While we think the path will be the same as on the NEOS Server machine in most cases, your Web server might expect perl in a different location. If you have no knowledge of your Web Server, try the default value. If your NEOS cgi scripts fail, you should check with your web master that the location of the cgi directory and the path to perl are correct.

• Select the background color for the WWW pages.
  Use your favorite color (in HEX representation).

• If you're customizing...
  • Give the absolute path to your Analog directory.
    Give the path to the directory where the "analog" executable is.
    You should set up configuration files there for total time stats
    and stats for the past month as all.cfg and month.cfg.

  • Where is your Kestrel home directory?
    The full path to the directory where the kestrel_server is.

  • Where is your Kestrel directory containing state information
    This is sort of like the Server directory for variable length files, but for Kestrel. Create the directory and give the full path.

  • What version number is your Kestrel Server?
    The version number is compiled into your Kestrel Server. If you do not have the source code, ask the person who gave you the executable.

• Where are the downloadable user interfaces located?
  You may want to set up a directory from which users can download the client submit package. Otherwise, you can use the Argonne directory for as long as it exists. Within the directory for downloading you will need to have the files index.html with links to download the Tcl/Tk submission tool and java.html with links to download the JAVA submission tool.

• Do you plan to distribute the NEOS Server software from that directory?
  Answer 1 only if you have a web page for downloading the Server package and are authorized to do so.

Untar the Server distribution files within a Web-accessible location. This creates a server- directory. Now create a cgi-bin directory and a Server directory, also in a Web-accessible location. The cgi scripts will go into the cgi-bin directory, while the Server directory will be used to store the Server web pages. You also need to designate a directory for variable length files. Only place them in a Web-accessible location if you do not care whether the world can see all submissions to your Server.

Use the ps command to check that the initializer.pl , scheduler.pl , and socket-server.pl scripts are running. You may need to use some options with the ps command to view processes with no controlling terminals; try auw or -fu neos , where neos is the user installing the Server.

You must edit the file lib/solver_tree under your directory for variable length files. The NEOS software library is divided into areas for the solvers. The entries of the solver tree specify the areas. The default solver tree has an entry for contributing solvers and a miscellaneous entry. If, for example, you want an entry for linear algebra problems, then add a line to the solver tree of the form

Linear algebra=la

In this case Linear algebra is the title and la is the token for the area. The token is arbitrary but must be in lower case.

If you execute make , you will see a new area in the list of solvers.

Updating the NEOS Server Software

First, disable the solver crontabs and delete the communications daemons (or have the solver administrators do so) for each of the solvers using the correct client-*.* comms tool. You may delete the .comms and .submit directories if they are not being used for any other server.

Disable the NEOS Server cron jobs by either executing crontab -r or, if you have other cron jobs running under the NEOS user name, edit the crontab via crontab -e to delete the lines related to the checker, cleaner, weekly report and daily report. Then kill the server with a server-/bin/kill-server.

Enter server-/config and run make allclean. Delete all of the neos related html pages from your web area, and remove the cgi scripts from their directory. If you are unsure whether a file belongs to neos, you can grep for its name in the server-/server/bin/make-* files. When you are finished, delete everything from server- on down.

These messages are meant to indicate problems with the database writing system. Each solver tries to get a lock on the master database file before writing. The Slept and flocked warning just means that the server was experiencing heavy traffic so that jobs needed to wait for one another to write to the database. Flock failed may indicate that file locking is not implemented on your operating system. This may occur on network file systems especially. It could also be a sign that one of your solver.pl processes died while it had a lock on the database. In some cases, it may indicate extremely heavy traffic. You might want to make sure than no one has written a script that sends jobs to your server at alarming rates.

While most changes to files can be integrated by running .../config/make, changing certain files requires that the server be killed with .../bin/kill-server before the .../config/make and restarted afterward with .../bin/restart. My rule of thumb is that changes that can be thought of as aesthetic usually do not require a server shut-down. Here you see an example where my rule fails because any change to the configuration data entered for .../config/make requires the shut-down and restart for everything to run correctly in the long run.