The Ecs System
Please note that the following is a copy of the packet
you can pick up from the Computer and Information Technologies group in Link 130. Please see http://www.ecs.syr.edu/cit for more information.
If you do not have an ECS account you should go to Link 130 to obtain an account. Also, the following is only a guide - if you need more help with the system, especially with Unix you should purchase a Unix help book.
Unix in a Nutshell by O'Reilly and Associates is one such book.
The College of Engineering and Computer Science
The Clusters/Labs
Welcome to the computing system for the College of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) at Syracuse University.
The College of Engineering and Computer Science provides NT systems and Unix systems for use by its students,
faculty, and staff. The ECS system, as it is called, is completely distinct from the SUnix system and the public
clusters. These systems are run by CMS and information concerning them can be found in the booklet "Student
Computing at a Glance" which can be picked up at the CMS Information Center, 116 Hinds Hall.
The College of Engineering and Computer Science maintains its own computing environment and clusters for use by
students enrolled in the College. The Computer and Information Technologies (CIT) group in the college of Engineering
maintains the ECS system and clusters. The help desk for the CIT group is located in Link 130. Also, they can
be reached via e-mail at help@ecs.syr.edu.
The NT clusters are located in 011 Link (referred to as the MADLab), 200 Link, 202 Link, and 209 Hinds. All cluster
machines have identical software running on them.
The ECS Unix clusters are located in 011 Link (the other half of the MADLab), in room 1-211 of the SciTech building
(known as the ECS Stars Cluster), 3-118 SciTech (the Foundry), and 3-122 SciTech (the Gallery).
About Your Passwords
There are 2 sets of passwords for the ECS system, one for NT and one for UNIX. Initially the passwords are set
to be the same for both systems. Please keep your UNIX and NT passwords the same at all times - it will save you
a lot of trouble. In order to change your passwords, you must change them on both systems as NT and UNIX passwords
are independent of each other. Changing your password on NT does NOT change your password on ECS Unix, and changing
your password on ECS Unix does NOT change your password on the NT system. See the NT and UNIX help sheets for
instructions on changing each password.
E-mail
At SU, there are numerous mail systems, each capable of receiving your mail in a personal mailbox or inbox. The
general campus UNIX system, known as SUnix, receives mail at the address "username@mailbox.syr.edu".
The SUnix system uses the POP protocol for e-mail, meaning that mail is taken off of the mail server and put into
your account. This mail can be "popped" and read on a PC running Netscape (or some other mail reader).
If you do use Netscape to pop your SUnix mail, please be sure to clean up the trash folder as it can get quite
large. It can also be read directly when on a SUnix timeshare (such as gamera, hydra, forbin, or rodan). If you
read your mail directly on the SUnix system, mail is stored under your mail directory in your SUnix account.
Your ECS account has its own mail system. ECS receives mail at the address "username@ecs.syr.edu".
The ECS system supports both the POP and IMAP protocols to receive mail. The IMAP protocol keeps your personal
inbox on the mail server. Mail folders other than your personal mailbox, i.e. your inbox , reside in the mail
directory in your ECS Unix account. Important: To access the ECS mail system, always use your ECS Unix password,
even if using Netscape to read your mail. The preferred mail reader for accessing your ECS inbox is pine, which
is set up to find your inbox when your account is created. Pine reads e-mail using the IMAP protocol, which is
preferred because it leaves messages on the mail server. This way, you can read your mail from multiple systems
and keep access to all of your mail wherever you are. If you really feel you must use POP (which erases your mail
from the server), our server supports it as well. The mail server is called ecs.syr.edu.
Supported E-mail Packages
While there are many packages for you to read your e-mail with, the CIT group supports the use of both Netscape
and Pine (including PC-Pine) for students. You can feel free to choose which one you use. However, no matter
which package you use you should use the IMAP protocol since this will enable you to view your same personal inbox
and folders from anywhere. It should be noted that the POP protocol can do this as well, but with much more difficulty.
Pine can be run as PC-Pine under NT. It connects directly to the mail server using IMAP and does not need any
setup. You can access your NT home space with PC-Pine. However, PC-Pine is only available in the ECS NT clusters.
Pine on the ECS Unix system is probably the most flexible in that it is easy to read your mail remotely since you
can connect to the server directly when logged in. It does not require any setup and allows you direct access
to your Unix home space. If you need to connect remotely, you can dial-in and telnet to an ECS UNIX host such as
apollo, then start up pine to read mail.
Netscape is nice in the sense that it can handle many languages and some attachments are easier to read with it.
Netscape allows you to access your NT home space, but must be set up to use the IMAP protocol to connect to the
ECS mail server. The mail server is called ecs.syr.edu and the IMAP server directory is ~/mail/. Outgoing (or
SMTP) setting should be set to either ecs.syr.edu or syr.edu. You may also want to set it up so that deleted messages
are moved to the trash. It is important to manage your trash when using Netscape.
To limit confusion and duplication, you should try to receive all your mail at one inbox on campus. Advertise
yourself using your username@syr.edu address and have that mail forwarded to the server where you want to read
your mail. Then forward your other mail accounts to your @syr.edu address. To learn more about your @syr.edu
address please visit the following web address http://cms.syr.edu/email/aliasing/.
Lab Rules
We try not to be too picky about how you use the labs, but the following rules apply:
* No food or drink is allowed in ANY cluster on campus. However, we realize that people will abuse this. If you
must eat in the lab, please sit at a table with no computers on it. People who are caught drinking or eating messy
foods at the computer will be asked to leave the lab. Repeat offenders will have their accounts locked out.
* Please pick up after yourself. We don't provide a maid service.
* You are NOT allowed to install programs on these machines, even if the machine lets you! These are shared machines,
and your program may affect other people in ways you don't expect.
Getting Help
If you need help or have suggestions, send mail to help@ecs.syr.edu.
Accounts
Accounts are provided on both the ECS UNIX and Windows NT systems for all ECS students (an ECS student being someone
pursuing a degree in the College of Engineering). The two accounts use the same user id and, initially, have the
same password. Changing your NT password has no effect on your UNIX password and vice-versa.
Non-ECS students taking ECS courses receive an account that expires when their course is finished. They are not
entitled to keep the account after the course ends, unless it is required for ongoing work with an ECS professor.
Students who receive an account for a course will be given access to both the UNIX and NT system.
Accounts must not be shared with friends - your account is a private resource provided for doing coursework and
ECS related research. Further, we do not provide accounts as platforms for games, on-line chatting, personal web
servers, or other activity unrelated to gaining a degree. People found abusing or attempting to cause damage to
the system of its user accounts will have their account locked. Repeat offenders will lose their account entirely.
Account Space
Each user account has an associated "home" space, which is where you find yourself at login (under UNIX),
or which is mapped to your "H" drive (under NT). This is the primary place you should store your work.
This space is backed up every night. There is a disk quota on the space, which you can inspect (NT: start menu/quotas/check
quota, UNIX: "quota -v" at the command line). Students receive 30MB on each system, for a total of
60MB. Generally, this quota will not be increased; since it has been set to a fairly generous limit that should
cover most of your needs.
If you are taking a course that requires significant space (for labs, etc.), special
areas will be set up as follows:
NT:
you will receive an additional share that you can map to some drive letter (S or Z recommended). This share will
be named using the course name and your user id, e.g., "cis252leonard$". This share has its own quota;
usually 100 MBytes.
Unix:
a file system named /home/coursename will exist with a subdirectory named with your login name, e.g., /home/mae373/leonard.
You can "cd" to this area to do lab work. Again, it has a separate quota.
Important note: one week after the course ends, the special shares/dirs will be removed. It is up to you to transfer
any important files to your main "home" area or to some other disk.
If you are working on a special project, additional space will be provided (within reason). For NT, an extra share
will be established on "elbrus" that you can map. For UNIX, and area under /home/projects will be created.
Finally, if you are faculty doing research that requires large disk space (e.g., more than 1GB), we ask that you
buy a disk for the servers which we will add and make exclusively available to your research group.
The ECS NT System
The ECS system runs NT 4, with machines located in the MADLab, Hinds 209, Link 200/246, and Link 202.
The PC environment we provide is not the same as that found on the general campus clusters. We have our own printers
and "home" space. The quota for your NT home space is 30MB.
Applications are mostly found under the "Start" menu. If a program you feel is useful is not installed,
please let us know and we will look into adding it. Do NOT install software on our lab systems.
When you log in, you will find that your home directory has been set up under H:. This is where you should keep
EVERYTHING! If you are taking certain courses, you may receive additional shares for doing coursework or labs.
Extremely important: Do not put files on the desktop (including "My Briefcase") - Any files put on
the desktop are likely to be removed when you logout. They are also not backed up. Use the desktop only for things
like shortcuts.
Where possible, we have set programs (like Netscape) to put things under H:. Some programs are difficult to preconfigure
and will require you to set some defaults the first time you run them. Any temporary files you place on the PC
can be stored under C:\TEMP. Files you place here are not backed up and may not even last between logon sessions.
Use C:\TEMP for holding large, run-time data files, like those produced by ANSYS, when you need better performance
or when the temp files exceed your account space. Storing files elsewhere under C: is unacceptable and such files
will be deleted.
FTP Access
Users can now access their H: share via ftp. Connect to ftp.ecshome.syr.edu. Your login name is ecs\username
and your password is your NT password. To access the handouts directory connect to ftp.ecs.syr.edu with ecs\username
as your login name and your password as your NT password. Then change to the handouts directory.
Changing your Password
Type CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up a special window that has an option for changing your password. If you change your
NT password, login to UNIX and change your password there to match the NT value - it will save you a lot of grief.
Logging Off
The PC's are meant to be left running at all times and should rarely need to rebooted. The proper way to end a
session is to use the "Start" button to select "Shutdown", then "Close all programs and
logon as a different user." If a program hangs, use CTRL-ALT-DEL and then select the Task Manager, which
can be used to (carefully) kill the program.
Locking a machine for more than 15 minutes is not acceptable behavior. Repeat offenders will find their accounts
locked out. If you are finishing a project that requires an overnight run, find a lab that is less crowded and
place a note on the machine indicating how long it will be running.
PC Web Browsing
The default web browser is Microsoft's Internet Explorer. You are welcome to change to Netscape, which is also
installed on our system.
Printing
Each lab has its own printer. You receive a default page quota of 500 pages across all printers in all labs per
semester. We do not yet have any connections to other campus printers. If you need to add pages to your ECS print
quota you can purchase more from the SU bookstore by purchasing a print coupon. Coupons are available in the following
denominations: 100 pages for $6, 500 pages for $25, and 1000 pages for $40.
All printers can be found on the server "everest". To add a printer, e.g., the Hinds 209 printer, do
the following: from "My Computer", select "printers", then "add printer". Next,
accept "Network printer server", select everest\Hinds209, then choose whether or not to make it your
default printer.
You can set your default printer at any time as follows: go into "My Computer", double-click on "Printers",
and right click on the printer you want as default, and select "make default".
Double-clicking on a printer icon will let you view the print queue - if your job is not printing, check the queue
first - don't just reprint the file.
Handouts
Class handouts can be found under the "handouts" share on "ecshome". Handouts are also accessible
via FTP. Simply connect to ftp.ecs.syr.edu. Your login name is ecs\username, and your password is your NT password.
Borland C++
Be sure to "initialize" Borland C++ each time you login.
Java
JDK 1.1.5 has been installed; you can find it on the P: drive. Run the batch file "javainit" to add
Java's bin subdirectory to your search path.
Pine
PC Pine is our default mail agent. It is easy to use, but doesn't have many bells and whistles. When you start
Pine, you have to enter your UNIX username (same as NT) and your ECS Unix password. This is because you are reading
your mail from the UNIX server. Pine will keep your mail within the UNIX system and not require any space from
your NT account.
While pine is the preferred PC program for reading from your ECS mailbox, you can also use other mail readers
like Eudora or Communicator. It is preferrred to set these programs to use IMAP to retrieve your mail (see the
section on E-mail at the beginning of this packet). When using Netscape, be careful of your "trash"
folder - Netscape tends to let this get very large without telling you.
PC X Software
The X software we have in place is called X-Win32. It works very well, and allows you to turn the machine in front
of you into a display for a remote UNIX server. Start it up, then telnet to a UNIX host, set your display variable
to point at the PC you're using (setenv DISPLAY machine:0), then start up your X apps. If you are using a lab
machine, your machine's name should be on a clearly visible label. Or, you can type "ipconfig /all|more"
from a command prompt and get the host name.
UNIX Environment
Over the past year, numerous small UNIX systems in ECS have been merged into one common environment which is simply
referred to as "ECS UNIX". The old ECS systems "top" and "smith" no longer exist,
although the old URL's still work. "ECS UNIX" has NOTHING to do with SUnix - when you login to SUnix
(rodan, forbin, gamera, hydra), you are using a CMS administered system which is not run by Engineering or the
CIT group. Mail sent to user@mailbox is also part of SUnix. Note however, that the old SUnix-served "Zoo"
cluster has been taken over by ECS and is now part of ECS UNIX and called the Stars cluster.
The ECS UNIX system has clusters available in three locations: Link 011 (the MADLab"), CST 1-211 (the "Stars"
cluster), CST 3-118 (the "Foundry"), and CST 3-120 (the Gallery). Numberous student offices also have
"ECS UNIX" clients.
Regardless of which machine you login to, you see the same account, the same mail "inbox" (you@ecs.syr.edu),
and find the same software (since we are totally converted to a Sun/Solaris environment).
Accounts and Passwords
The "home" space on the ECS Unix side is where you find yourself at login and follows the convention
/home/<group>/<username>. All home spaces are backed up nightly. Your quota is 30MB on the ECS Unix
system.
To change your UNIX password, use the "passwd" command. We suggest that, if you change your UNIX password,
you log into the NT system and change that password to match your UNIX password - it will save you a lot of trouble
in the long run.
You can find out what your UNIX quota is with "quota -v".
Servers
The ECS Unix system provides 2 servers for offsite use: apollo.ecs.syr.edu and boreas.ecs.syr.edu. Apollo is the
general purpose server and should be used to check e-mail and run small jobs. To run large compute jobs (>50MB)
you should use boreas.ecs.syr.edu which has 2 processors and 2GB of RAM.
Applications
There are numerous application packages on the ECS UNIX system, including Matlab and other commercial products.
See the "unixweb" site mentioned below for details.
Printing
All of the ECS NT print queues can be found on the "ECS UNIX" machines. The queue name is the same as
the NT sharing name, e.g., "link200", or "madlabhp". You can print Postscript files with a
command like "lpr -Pcst3116 file" and text files with something like "enscript -Pzoo file".
To monitor your job in the print queue, use something like "lpq -Pmadps" and to remove a job, use "lprm
-Pmadlabhp jobid", where "jobid" is the job number shown by the "lpq" command.
Direct UNIX printing to the Machinery Hall printers is no longer available. We are looking into other options
for supporting color printing.
Etiquette
We have a limited number of machines, so improper usage of "xlock" will no longer be tolerated. Anyone
who locks a machine for more than 15 minutes will likely find the machine reset. Repeat offenders will have their
account locked.
UNIX E-mail
All "ECS UNIX" accounts provide the owner with a maildrop named username@ecs, with ecs.syr.edu being
the mail server. You can connect to the server directly when on UNIX, using pine or mh-mail (or perhaps an emacs
variant). The mail folders other than your "inbox" are kept under your "mail" directory.
You can also connect via Netscape (UNIX and PC's) or Eudora (PC's), using either IMAP or POP (IMAP recommended,
see E-mail at the beginning of this packet).
The former @top and @smith mail systems are defunct. Do NOT try to use them. All @top and @smith mail has been
auto-forwarded to your ecs mail account.
Forwarding E-mail
If you want to have your @ecs mail forwarded somewhere else, do the following in your UNIX home directory: create
a file name ".forward" and place in it a single line with the forwarding address. Then, do "chmod
644 .forward".
More Details
Visit the Web site at http://unixweb.ecs.syr.edu/unixinfo for more details, policies, and FAQ's for the "ECS
UNIX" system.