Simon's Work Place

These are my work related web pages. For my fun pages and more about me you probably want to meander over to Tardis where my real home page is located.

As you might have guessed I work here, in the Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University as a Computing Officer.

I'm currently playing around with SSL servers and certificates. You can visit the department's secure server (If its running - I am playing around with it, after all). You can also take a look at the beginnings of a Departmental Certification Authority

I spend most of my time looking after

• Printing We run the LPRng print spooling package, with a locally written back end that handles automatic format conversion and a number of powerful page manipulation options. More information is available from the Printing page.

• LaTeX and TeX We're running an old and out of date TeX installation. Its a locally constructed tree based around Karl Berry's kpathsea distribution, that rotted for two years whilst it was unsupported. We're in the process of building a new TeX tree based aroung teTeX, which we will migrate over to shortly. There is a local LaTeX page, but be careful, as its not been updated recently.

• The Web Server We use Apache as our web server, with the PHP/FI server side scripting extensions. We use cgiwrap to create a more secure seperation between the web server and its CGIs. As mentioned above we're also using the Apache-SSL patches in conjunction with SSLeay to provide a secure web service.

• The Web Cache In an attempt to reduce both our local and international bandwidth usage we run a caching web proxy. The proxy is based around the Squid cache software, I'm also evaluating running a JunkBuster interface to it for those who are really concerned about privacy. Much more information on the cache will be linked from here soon.

• Web statistics We use calamaris, PY_squid_stats, cache-stats, Analog and BotWatch to generate statistics for our web servers.

• autoconf
• gawk
• ghostscript
• GNU m4
• ncftp
• rcs
• python

• Assorted cryptography routines As you might have guessed from my real home page I'm firmly in favour of freely available strong cryptography. To this end I maintain a varied library of cryptographic tools, including SSLeay. More information should be available from the local crypto homepage

• CVS A version control system. This is currently being evaluated as a means of tracking local modifications to installed packages - I'm supposed to be writing some documentation on the subject.

• lynx The free, text-only web browser. See the local copy of the documentation or visit the main lynx site

• html2ps A very powerful html to postscript convertor. More information is available from the distribution site

• The info and man page readersYou can read any man or info page thats installed on the system over the web.

• latex2html We use this to generate HTML versions of our internal documentation (when people actually bother to create HTML files, rather than just making them available as DVI or PDF - yuck). It generates much better results if you take the time to write a style file for it (see our technotes for an example). One of these days I'll write something on how to go about writing a style files. In the mean time mailing me for more information probably won't hurt.

• gd The gd GIF manipulation library. We've got a local copy of the documentaion or you might want to take a look at the main gd page.

• gv An alternative ghostscript front end. Documentation is available from the distribution site