[102] in Enterprise Print Delivery Team
zephyr info
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Whitson)
Thu Mar 2 18:14:11 2000
To: printdel@MIT.EDU
From: Mike Whitson <mwhitson@MIT.EDU>
Date: 02 Mar 2000 17:58:52 -0500
Message-Id: <n91k8jl3ro3.fsf@antharia.mit.edu>
I promised some information and pointers on Zephyr, so here they are.
The On-Line Help Zephyr document <URL:http://web.mit.edu/olh/Zephyr/>
contains a decent overview/introduction, although it all the usage
examples are athena/unix specific. But it does explain the concepts
involved in using the system. Other overview/reference pointers are:
OLC's Zephyr stock answers:
http://web.mit.edu/answers/zephyr/
SIPB's "Inessential Zephyr" document:
http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/izephyr/html/izephyr.html
In case those documents are too obtuse, I'll give a brief overview.
Zephyr is a distributed instant-messaging system used by many people
around MIT. Users can access Zephyr from any computer which has
Zephyr client software installed, using Kerberos to authenticate to
the system.
There are two common ways of using Zephyr. The first use is as a
single-user to single-user communication -- I compose and send a
message to lambert, and (assuming lambert is subscribing to
Zephyrgrams), the Zephyr system passes the message to his local
machine, wherever that may be.
Alternatively, Zephyr can be used to communicate between groups of
people, using a beast called a "class". A class is somewhat like a
chat room - you can subscribe to any number of classes, and you will
then receive all zephyrgrams which have been sent to that class. For
example, say we use a class called "printdel". Instead of composing
messages to individual people, we simply send messages to all
subscribers to class "printdel", and anyone who is subscribed will
receive it. Exactly how one does this depends on whether you're using
unix, MacOS, or Windows, so I won't go into specifics here.
Zephyr is integrated with Athena, so if you use Athena, you don't need
to do anything special to set it up. For desktop machines, you'll
need to download and install Zephyr if you haven't already:
Windows: http://web.mit.edu/pismere/zephyr/
MacOS: http://web.mit.edu/is/help/maczephyr/
Also, Zephyr requires that you have Kerberos installed:
Windows: http://web.mit.edu/is/help/mink/
MacOS: http://web.mit.edu/is/help/kclient/
-mike
