Servers

The SOWN network has numerous servers (both physical and virtual) it uses to host the services it provides. These are variously described below.

SOWN has two physical gateway servers (GW-B32 and GW-B53) hosted in separate server rooms at the University of Southampton. This allows it to provide a High Availability Firewall (HAFW) and router at the edge of its network.

Both gateway servers are connected to the wider University of Southampton network across an uplink Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN). The IP subnets (v4 and v6) used by this VLAN are allocated both to these gateway servers and the University of Southampton's routers.

To provide high availability, there are floating IP addresses both for v4 and v6. Using Keepalived, one gateway server is defined as the primary and the other as the secondary. If the primary server goes offline, the secondary will take control of the floating IP addresses and starting firewalling and routing SOWN's network traffic. When the primary server comes back online, it will reassume control of these floating IP addresses.

Both gateway servers use Netfilter's nftables to provide the HAFW. They are run BIRD to providing routing for the SOWN network.

SOWN currently has two Virtual Machine (VM) servers (VMS-B32-1 and VMS-B53-1) that run many of the virtualized servers SOWN runs on its network.

These servers run Linux Containers (LXC) to allow SOWN to provision VMs on the SOWN network using a comprehensive command line interface.

SOWN currently has two physical backup servers (BACKUP-B32-1 and BACKUP-B53-1) that are used to backup other servers on the SOWN network.

Backups are acheived by each of these servers running a nightly cron job, which connects to each server in turn and runs rsync to take a snapshot of the server's filesystem. The backup servers use ZFS so that these snapshots can be retained as incremental changes (known as deltas) between one snapshot and the next.

SOWN currently has two virtual login servers (LOGIN and LOGIN-2). These allow SOWN members with jump servers to connect to other servers on the SOWN network

One server is hosted on VMS-B32-1 and the other on VMS-B53-1 to ensure there is always a route to connect to every server on the SOWN network.

SOWN currently has three virtual container servers (CONTAINERS-1, CONTAINERS-2 and CONTAINERS-3) for running Docker containers to provide various services on the SOWN network.

• CONTAINERS-1 a.k.a. CONTAINERS-DEV is intended for services under development or testing that are not yet ready for full deployment. This server therefore has a wildcard DNS record to make it easy for SOWN members to add new Docker containers to develop and/or test services.
• CONTAINERS-2 a.k.a. CONTAINERS-PROD is intended for full production services, which can be used across the SOWN network.
• CONTAINERS-3 a.k.a CONTAINERS-SECURE is intended for full production services that require a higher level of security such as Single Sign-On (SSO) or other services managing authentication and/or authorization.