Background

Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) Services

Firewall/Gateway

Internal Services

Internal Clients

Future Plans
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Network and Computer Services: Internal Clients

The main workstations on the BIC network are Marquis models available from ASL, inc. I chose the Dual Pentium processors with at least 1 GB RAM. I also added cd writers and zip drives. The cd writers aid users in backing up their personal data on a medium readable by most new computers, while the zip drives are convienent and relatively conventional. Upon recieving each workstation, I immediately repartion the main hard drive and install a version of Linux Mandrake which I have heavily customized. I also use custom kernels from ASL.

As described in the preceeding section, the majority of the user's data, personal files, and profile information are stored on a large external rack-mounted SCSI RAID drive mounted by this server and exported to the network via NFS, Samba, and Netatalk. To utilize these services the clients need to be properly configured.

I will briefly discuss the configuration of NFS clients and then briefly describe the most important fMRI applications installed on our workstations.

NFS Clients

Mounting NFS files is easy; simply add a line to the /etc/fstab file on the client machine. Here are a few sample lines:

server:/raid0 /raid0 nfs exec,dev,suid,rw,bg,intr 0 0

server:/home/admin /root/admin nfs exec,dev,suid,rw,bg,intr 0 0

server:/home/programs /usr/local/raid0 nfs exec,dev,suid,ro,bg,intr 0 0

A couple of important points about these entries should be emphasized. First, NFS files can be either hard or soft mounted.

fMRI Analysis Software

  • VoxBo is a comprehensive Linux-based fMRI analysis suite similar to Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM). It is developed primarily by Dan Kimberg and Geoff Aguirre at the University of Pennsylvania and written in C and IDL.

  • Analysis of Functional NeuroImages (AFNI) is a set of UNIX-based (including Linux) C programs for processing and displaying fMRI data developed by Robert Cox.

  • Automated Image Registration (AIR) is a useful utility written in C for the automatic coregistration of 2D and 3D images from Roger Woods.

  • mri3dX is a very nice visualization program for UNIX systems written in C by Krish Singh.

  • mricro is a visualization program from Chris Rorden.

  • fidl is a program for fMRI analysis.

  • E-Prime is a Windows application for the creation of experimental presentations.

  • Presentation is also a Windows application for the creation of experimental presentations.