Ornia

= Current state of the Ornia project: Ornia is dead, long live Hydra... =



Ornia is no longer housed in the Johnson Library Center server room; as a result its services are no longer available on campus. Fret not! While a replacement server cannot be expected for several weeks, students from the GNU+Linux Users Group plan to provide replacements for all of the services which Ornia previously provided (DC++ Hub included) in the near future.

Rumors around campus told of a resurrection of the Ornia hub at a new address on November 23, 2009. Though not completely operational yet, the hub was in fact back on board. This was a glorious day, and it should henceforth be celebrated always.

History
ornia is a project started by Niko in his first semester as a student at Hampshire, the Fall of 2006. In addition to his primary workstation/desktop machine, he brought with him a second tower which comprised second-hand spare x86 hardware components with the Slackware GNU+Linux distribution installed onto its 60GB hard drive. Within a month of being a student, Niko made the initial attempts to get the college to grant this as of then unnamed server its own external IP address and appropriate network resources to host information services accessible to the entire Internet.

In order for this to be approved, Niko found that he needed an academic basis for being granted such network resources, so he stayed up late one fine evening in his dorm room hashing out an examination of the technological evolution of the Internet as it relates to the issue of anonymity, concluding with a proposal to study anonymity networks such as Tor and GNUnet. This essay, now significant only as much as it's role in the history of ornia, is available here. Niko brought this machine into the server room on the ground floor of the library and the IP address 192.101.188.51 was granted to the machine, along with the subdomain 'ornia' under the domain hampshire.edu.

How can I use ornia?
ornia runs many different services for use by those not only on the Hampshire College campus, but also the entire Internet. ornia's services are constantly evolving, expanding, and improving, but there are quite a few services which you can make use of right now. Things such as E-mail, web sites, encrypted voice communication, file sharing (Hampshire campus only), radio and video streams, Free Software &amp; Culture game servers (Nexuiz and Tremulous), wikis, and psychronous conferencing (text chat) work right now.

ornia's services are created intentionally so that they not only run Free/Open Source Software themselves, but also so that they are utilised best by Free Software on the client end, or your computer. All ornia's services are also platform agnostic, meaning it doesn't matter if you run GNU+Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows because all three can run the Free Software applications necessary to utilise ornia's services. You can see a list of services and instructions on how to use them on all three desktop operating systems on the ornia portal page on Hampedia.

Hardware

 * Mainboard: 1 x Tyan Thunder n3600R (S2912) (coreboot ready)
 * CPU: 2 x AMD Opteron 2216HE Dual-Core, 2.4GHz per core, 2MB L2 cache, 1GHz FSB, energy efficient 68 Watt TDP
 * RAM: 4 x Corsair 2GB DDR2-667 PC2-5300 Registered ECC
 * SATA Hard Disk Drives: 6 x 750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 16MB Disk buffer 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM configured in a (RAID-5 array)
 * SAS Hard Disk Drives: 2 x 146GB Maxtor Atlas 8D147S0 10,000RPM SAS (RAID-1 array)
 * Power Supply Unit: 1 x Seasonic S12-650, 650 Watt ATX, Energy Efficient 80 PLUS Certification
 * Heatsink/Fan: 2 x Dynatron A5MG CPU Coolers
 * Chassis: 1 x 4U EATX Rack Mount Chassis

These components give ornia over 10GHz of raw processing power spread across four different CPU cores, 8 Gigabytes of RAM, and a redundant array of over 3.5 Terabytes of storage space, the entire contents of which is entirely encrypted.

Software
ornia runs the Xen paravirtualisation hypervisor at its core, which is booted by the GNU GRUB bootloader after the POST is performed. The Xen hypervisor in turn loads the host operating system which is a minimalistic installation of the GNU+Linux distribution, Debian. This host operating system in turn boots multiple guest operating systems automatically. These guest OSes can be anything from various different distributions of GNU+Linux or *BSDs or OpenSolaris, or even proprietary operating systems with the help of AMD's hardware virtualisation extensions inside the CPUs

Choice of Hardware
ornia was created specifically to run no proprietary, non-free software from the ground up. The components were chosen specifically to financially support hardware manufacturers which have shown a notable movements to make their hardware work with Free/Open Source software and freely licensed drivers in the operating system GNU+Linux. For example, the motherboard was chosen because of its ability to provide high-end features such as a built-in RAID-5 SATA2 controller plus a RAID SAS controller but also be compatible with Coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS). This gives the board the ability to be liberated by flashing the BIOS EEPROM chip and replacing it with an improved GPL-licensed alternative: coreboot. The manufacturer of the CPUs is AMD who was chosen instead of Intel Corporation because AMD released graphics processing unit documentation to the world so that Free Software drivers may be produced for all ATI-brand video cards with full 3-D acceleration. Intel however has been shown to be consistently stubborn in the process of making their wireless networking cards work with Freely licensed drivers and firmware.

An attempt was also made to purchase components which would draw as little power as possible. ornia's power supply, the device which converts the wall's AC power to DC in order to provide the other components with electrical energy, has an 80 PLUS certification which guarantees that ornia will never be less than 80% efficient in terms of the amount of energy it supplies, divided by how much energy is input. The company Seasonic was chosen because their products consistently achieve and surpass the 80 PLUS certification, being the first company to market with an 80 PLUS product back in 2005. The CPUs in ornia are also much more energy efficient than most processors of this caliber. A normal Opteron 2216 consumes 95 Watts TDP, whereas the HE version of the same CPU (2 of which were chosen for ornia) consumes only 68 Watts TDP at the same speeds.

Choice of Software
ornia runs only 100% Free Software, which means software which has been released under a license approved by the Free Software Foundation. It is true and always will be that ornia is constructed of only Free Software on a system with a Free Software operating system, to ensure the security and longevity of the project.

The Xen hypervisor was chosen because it is an enterprise-level virtualisation solution which allows ornia to have a GPL-licensed hypervisor under which multiple operating systems can run concurrently.

GNU+Linux was chosen for ornia's operating systems because it offers the most powerful, flexible, modern server operating system with the additional benefit of being comprised of mostly GPL-licensed software.