Waldo

Waldo is the Union's webserver. It is the third Waldo incarnation and was commissioned in September 2005 (replacing Waldo No2 which was built in December of 2000 and entered active service at the end of January 2001, replacing Waldo No1 which had served us well for approximately 5 years).

Waldo is a 3GHz Xeon, with 1Gb of RAM, running OpenBSD (3.9 at time of writing) with a 100Mbit connection to the Manchester University network and on to Janet. It has multiple 160Gb hard drives and backups are done offsite.

Waldo runs the Apache Webserver, the MySQL database engine and allows PHP and Perl scripts to be run.

Waldo serves:
  • FuseFM and its website. The student radio station shifts a lot of traffic when it is on air. The station is able to broadcast over the internet as an mp3 stream
  • Student Direct newspaper and its website which is another heavy-duty task
  • Society webpages

Waldo handles mail for over 200 societies and groups. Mail is accessible via IMAP, POP and a webmail interface. In addition to the usual mail applications available via ssh or telnet.

Waldo was built and configured by Sam. He also maintains the system with assistance from Kevin and Ian. Kevin Patrick is the staff member responsible for Waldo.

The services described here are for University of Manchester Students' Union registered societies only. All requests must be made from yoursociety@umsu.man.ac.uk to root@umsu.man.ac.uk.