LinuxJournal.com: In delivering a new bioinformatics curriculum in the Graduate School at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, we undertook the challenge of incorporating new computational resources over an existing research support infrastructure, adding new services and platforms and reacting to an increasingly burdensome responsibility to protect ourselves from network threats. Our new environment spans two cities and links Linux workstations, Linux servers, Silicon Graphics workstations, a Sun 6800 Enterprise Server and the Internet. Open-source solutions combined with selective use of commercial resources integrate in a cost-effective, service-friendly, bioinformatics research environment. In this report, we describe solutions to a set of challenges in our core, Linux-driven server/client environment.

As with many universities, our public computer labs are Microsoft boxes with the Office suite, and we have a set of clients--Web, secure telnet, secure FTP, IMAP2 mail and X. The bioinformatics software the university hosted lay behind these workstations, on Sun/Solaris and SGI/Irix servers. We needed an environment in which we could do several things: (1) manage workstations efficiently, (2) quickly add or delete applications, (3) rebuild workstations, (4) ensure availability and storage and (5) address network and data security issues.

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