what we use to produce our papers


We are often asked 'what sort of equipment is needed to produce a newspaper?' Whilst this page is not an exhaustive coverage of every system we use, it will give an idea of our key system components.

Computers are the heart of everything we do. All our pre-press machines are Apple Macintosh computers - generally dual processor G4 or G5 models. These are configured with gigabytes of RAM. Hard disk space is not a major consideration as all work is kept on shared file servers
xserve5
Torch Publishing's file servers are rack mounted Apple XServes running Mac OSX Server software. These servers connect to an Apple XServeRaid (pictured below) which is a cluster of 5 high speed hard drives which store our data. These allow high speed access to our information and also provide a degree of protection against a single disk failure. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

xserveraid

Editorial systems are not very demanding as far as computing power goes.
Currently we are using Apple iMac and eMac and Mac Mini computers running FilemakerPro 5.5 software which connects to a FileMakerPro server. The stories are saved into a custom written database which allows all journalists and subs to access all stories.
This system will soon be changed to an open source MySQL database with an in-house written graphic user interface (GUI).

Classifieds, like editorial, is not terribly demanding on hardware performance. Most of these machines are Pentium 1 ghz running proprietory classified software (Pongrass Classad). The classified software is based on the Sybase SQL database running on Windows NT servers.

Finally, our computer to plate system runs on the Windows 2000 Server platform with java based admin clients software to control it.
As we deal more and more with outside clients we have found it essential to have a permanent Internet link. We have two links to the outside world - a 2.2 meg ADSL service and a 1.5 meg backup service. This makes it easy for our clients to supply work to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

These services also allow us to maintain our own web, ftp, mail and DNS servers onsite.

Our web server runs the open source Apache, MySQL and PHP.
Our FTP server runs CrushFTP
Our Mail server runs Communigate Pro
Our DNS server runs QuickDNS Pro (Bind)

All of these servers are running on Apple hardware and Mac OS X software. We run these systems because they are extremely reliable, powerful and offer a great ROI (Return On Investment).