The Federation.

The Federation is a concentration of PC servers.

It used the Novell Netware file services. This allowed a single user authentication
to access any server in the directory tree structure. When the desktop moved to Windows NT4
the service moved to Windows 2000 AD (Active Directory) for the file/directory services.

Over the last few years the number of PCs (Personal Computers) has dramatically increased
so that in 1994 there were about 3700 in the University. The support of all these was beyond the
Computing Service staff.
The PCs were supported by the owners or technicians in the departments.

The Computing Service installed PCs in its clusters and supported them centrally via The Federation.
Any user could logon to any PC in any cluster and see the same applications and their personal files.
The applications were on each cluster PC but the user files were on central servers.
There were nine Service Federation clusters of PCs plus four belonging to other departments,
totalling 260 PCs for registered users.

There were 6 Federation servers.

town1

town2

town3

town4

town5

town6

In addition to the town servers there were other Federation machines.

There were three Charon mail gateways.
They connected the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) of the Internet
to the Netware mail system.

bowscale

scales

seascale

fargrain was a hybrid server to Computing Service staff machines.

peak was an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server.