All servers are mortal. Socrates is a server. Therefore…
Socrates, and its predecessors violet and garnet, have been providing a general Unix environment to campus researchers for something like 20 years now. The current server is now quite old, and the demand for a central unix server has dwindled. IST announced that, rather than replace the current socrates hardware, that they will retire the service entirely.
Many L&S academics are still using socrates, usually as a place for simple web hosting for their individual or lab home pages. It does not appear that there will be a simple migration path for those users; IST’s announcement of the abatement, and the lack of a clear migration path, generated a lively discussion on the campus Micronet mailing list.
In response, IST will be holding a Socrates Customer Forum on Tuesday, April 8, at 10:00 AM in Sibley Auditorium (Bechtel Engineering Center). If you are invested in web hosting or other services provided on socrates, especially web hosting, it may behoove you to attend that forum.
If you simply need to be able to use a Unix command line, there are probably reasonable alternatives for you; Mac OS X is a full Unix environment, and if you use Windows you can install the Cygwin environment to be able to work in a Unix-like way.
