Getting Started
In order to use the computers at MSRI you must have an account. If you have received this pamphlet as part of your registration packet then your account has been created and is ready for your use. In your registration packet you will find a Computer Access & Email Account Information sheet with the username and password assigned to you. Please note that this is a temporary password and should be changed immediately upon your first login. Information on how to change a password is included on the Computer Access & Email Account Information sheet, as well as within this document. If you have arrived and your computer account has not been set up, please see Rachelle Summers, in room 229, after you have checked in.
Most importantly, please do not give access to your account to anyone else. If a guest asks to use your account, send him/her to the computing staff; we provide a temporary account for our guests.
Every MSRI office has two machines, a PC running Linux, and either a Tektronics X-terminals, served by a multi-processor Linux workstation, or a second Linux PC.
In the second floor lab (room 225), there are three high end Sun
Ultra's, while in the third floor lab (room 325), there are 3
Macintoshes, 2 Linux PCs and one dual-boot Linux/NT PC. Also available on
our network are three very fast cycle-servers
for intense computations, ted, a dual processor HP,
carol, a dual processor Sun Ultra and alice, a dual-450 MHz
Pentium II Linux box.
For most purposes, it does not matter which machine you sit down at---they all have the same generic functionality.
To log onto a UNIX computer:
When you sit down you should see a window on screen with the following message:
login:
Welcome to machine_name.msri.org
password:
and below it a popup menu labeled Session Type: and
three buttons labeled Go!, Cancel, and
Shutdown.
Make sure that caps lock is off or you will get an error message.
Enter your login ID followed by a RETURN. Enter your
password followed by a RETURN. You will enter the X
window system using our default kde window manager,
described below.
You can probably ignore the other menus and buttons, but, for your
information, the Session Type: menu selects your window manager, Go! logs you in,
Cancel allows you to go back and correct any errors that
you might have made.
While you can probably guess what Shutdown does, we would
ask you not to shutdown your machine yourself - we need to see
problems in order to diagnose them and can often find less radical
solutions than power cycling. Furthermore, a computer which is turned
off cannot be upgraded automatically across the network.
Session
Type: menu: fvwm2 and fvwm95 are also
popular and have been customized slightly to include root menus
appropriate to the MSRI environment similar to those described below. If you are familiar with them, you can also
select a Motif-like window manager, mwm, or the original
twm.
If you have trouble logging in, your X
environment may have been improperly customized (see section on Customizing Your Environment)
and you should use the failsafe option from the Session
Type: menu. You will be logged in with no window
manager; this should allow you to at least send a request for help.
Quit when you are through.
To telnet into your MSRI account from the Macs, use the NCSA
Telnet application. To telnet to sites outside of MSRI,
you must first connect to the proxy server using the command,
telnet msri.org. At the next prompt, telnet to the host
you wish to connect to:
MSRI telnet proxy host
opie.msri.org>telnet durban.berkeley.edu
SunOS UNIX (durban.berkeley.edu)
login:
myprompt 70% telnet msri.org
Trying 198.129.64.226...
Connected to msri.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
Trying 128.32.183.106 port 23...
Connected to durban.berkeley.edu.
Ftp access on the macs is provided
through the Fetch application.
We currently have only one system that is available
for members needing use of an Windows-type box. The machine is a dual boot
client that runs Linux and Windows NT. There is no guest account for the
NT client. Members are given an account by special request only. If the only
need for the NT system is to read a Word document, Linux provides the
catdoc utility which is able to parse through a Word document
and generate ASCII text.
2bor!2b saturn5? 23skidoo 4/3pir^3 E=mc^2Of course, these are no longer good passwords here, having been used as examples.
passwd. You will be asked for
your old password and then for a new one which you will have to enter
twice.
Here you see:
The leftmost icon in the title panel pops up a window operations menu. From there you can choose to:
Maximize the window to full screen size.
Iconify the window, leaving it accessible only as an
icon in the window menu.
Move, or
Resize the window with the mouse (though you can
just as easily move the window by dragging it by the title bar with
the mouse, or move it by dragging the sides, bottom, or lower corners
of the window frame with the mouse).
Sticky from desktop to desktop.
Desktop.
Close the window. Note this merely
closes the window, and probably doesn't quit the application running
in the window properly. For example, closing your Netscape window this
way will probably result in a message telling you that Netscape is
already running the next time you launch it.
In the center, there are a cluster of buttons, marked
One through Four for moving among the
various virtual desktops. You can also move from one another by moving
the mouse pointer off an edge of the screen.
Just to the left of the desktop buttons are two buttons: an X for logging out, and a lock, for locking the screen.
To the left of the central button group, are various commonly used icons and popup menus.
xterm for typing UNIX
commands.
pine mail
reader.
Top, a listing of the top running processes.
NEdit, a very simple, but powerful mouse-based
text editor.
Emacs editor (see section on The Essentials of Emacs below for
more on emacs).
Xfig drawing program.
man pages.
xdvi dvi previewer.
GV PostScript viewer.
xv viewer for bitmapped graphics files.
Help, which brings you to this Computing Handbook.
Request program (see section on
Reporting Problems).
When the pointer is in the screen background, there are two menus invoked by each of the two left mouse buttons.
An extremely useful feature of the X-windows environment is that it
supports copying and pasting between most applications (a notable
exception is Mathematica). Dragging across a range of text
with the left mouse button held down copies the highlighted text to a
temporary buffer. Clicking with the middle mouse button pastes the
text. This can be used, for example, to copy error messages into a
Laptops are assigned names and IP addresses using DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol)
and will be a part of the msri.org domain. We currently only support Ethernet
connections, specifically TCP/IP. There is no support for AppleTalk or
other protocols.
While we will do everything we can to respond immediately to your
needs, this is not always possible. In order to keep problems from
falling through the cracks and guarantee a response, we use a program,
To invoke
Be sure to include your name, room number and especially your email
address. Please use the popup menus in the center of the page to
choose an operating system type, area (hardware/software), and to
suggest a priority. Your summary should be concise and suggestive.
In order that we be better able to help you, your description should
include as much information as you have
available: machine name, error message(s), application(s) in use when error
occurred, whether or not error is intermittent or consistent, etc.
Alternatively, a simpler choice may be to send email to
request@msri.org.
If you are outside the MSRI domain, this is the only option available to you
as it is not possible to submit a request via the web form.
Once you have submitted it you will either see a confirmation
screen
Miscellany
Printers
At login, several setup scripts and initialization files are run on
your behalf which allows you to conveniently access computing facilities
and applications. Your environment includes the setting of the variable,
$PRINTER. By default, this variable is set to the floor on which your office
resides, which by consequence, corresponds to the names of our printers: 2 and
3. So, if your office is on the 3rd floor, by default your output will go
to printer 3, located on the 3rd floor. A similar association is set for
the second floor. Printers are located in rooms 225 and 325. If for any
reason you wish to redirect your output to a different printer, you may do
so using the lpr command. Specifically, lpr -Pprinter_name
will override any default setting you might have.
The printers in rooms 225 and 325 only produce single-sided output. For
duplex printing, you may direct output to the printer in the library (libhp)
with the command: lpr -Plibhp. As this printer may be used for duplex jobs
that may not be library-related, we ask that you pick up your output in a
timely manner and refrain from printing large jobs that tie up the printer
during peak working hours.
Backups
Should that pesky rm command cause you to inadvertently remove some
file by mistake, take heart; file restoration is usually a trivial matter.
Member and staff accounts are archived to tape, nightly, except for Saturday,
starting at 10 pm. Files that are created and deleted during typical work
hours, unfortunately, cannot be retrieved.
To request a file restoration, please submit a request
that contains the file name, location and best estimate of when it was last
available on the system.
Remote Access into MSRI
For those of you who desire to connect to MSRI from your home base while
visiting here, we have a list of recommended Internet Service Providers (ISP)
in the area. MSRI does not provide dialup access to its network. Once
you have secured access to the internet, you will be able to access MSRI via
opie and or
ssh.
Laptops in the Office
You are permitted to bring your laptop and connect it to the network, provided
that you sign a form consenting to cooperate and abide by the regulations stipulated
in the policy agreement.
If your system has an administrative password, you will be asked to provide it
to the computing staff in a sealed enveloped, to be opened only in an emergency.
When you depart, this envelope will be returned to you, unopened, or at your
request, it will be destroyed.
Our Hours
Someone will be available to respond to your computing needs from the hours of
8:30 am to 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday. A description of problems occurring outside of these
hours should be forwarded to the computing department via the request
system. This will ensure that it will come to our attention when we arrive back
at our stations.
Reporting Problems
We strive to provide timely, personal support for your computing
needs. Please feel free to come and speak to a staff member about any
computing problem you might have. In most cases, the first person you
should look for is our System Administrator, Rachelle
Summers, in room 229, phone number 643-6069. She will be able to
answer most questions and will refer more resistant problems as
necessary.
wreq, which is an evolved version (by Yuanli Yu) of our
earlier request system request, to log and track
suggestions, problems, and queries. For backwards compatability, we
refer to both as request.
request, you can either use the form interface
on the MSRI Computing request web page,
or
select the Request menu item in the Utilities root
m.htmlenu. In either case, you will be presented with a form interface,
within Netscape. Just fill in the blanks.
or receive email,
directing you to a URL where you can check the status of your
request,
by clicking on its
number in the list at the top of the page. At that page, you can also check FAQs,
tech notes, and much more. Explore!
Logging Out
For security, it is very important that you log all the way out
of all your windows and window manager when you are done using
the computer, especially in the public labs.
The computer should have the Welcome screen on it before you leave.
In order to achieve this, you should choose Logout
from the root Utilities menu.
Last modified by Rachelle Summers on
Thu Aug 26 16:43:35 PDT 1999