CS. Dept. Network FAQ.

Welcome to the Computer Science Department's network FAQ (a synopsis of Frequently Asked Questions). It addresses questions regularly asked of the CS systems staff and provides a summary of useful information regarding the Department's computing facilities which is hard to find anywhere else.

In addition to this FAQ, the news-group csu.cs.systems provides announce- ments and information of interest to users of Computer Science computing facilities. Many important announcements, such as system or network down-time or newly installed facilities, are posted only in csu.cs.systems. (For instance, you might learn that the network is to be down the night before your programming assignment or research proposal is due.)

1. Getting Help

2. Hours of Operation

3. System Information

4. User Account Information

5. File Storage, Backup, Restoration, and Transfer

6. Disk Usage

7. X Windows

8. Printing

9. Dial Up, Wireless, and Remote Access

10. Mail / News / WWW

11. Windows

12. Mac OS

13. Linux

14. Solaris

This file is available as ~info/faq.

A variety of books have been published on the basics of the Unix operating system. These can be obtained from your favorite bookstore. Additionally, some instructional video tapes are available at the front desk in the CS labs, covering various aspects of the Unix operating system. Academic Computing and Network Services also offers introductory Unix seminars, at the beginning of each semester. The schedules for these are posted in the CS labs.

The Unix "man" command provides access to the typical on-line Unix reference manual set on all our systems. More complete reference manual sets for most of our supported operating systems and various other technical books and manuals are available for perusal in the systems offices (rooms 312 and 313). The lab-ops also have several books and manuals available for check-out. Supplementary documents for various software packages found in /usr/local are often embedded in the source trees for the given software package. For instance, /s/parsons/f/src/local/bin/emacs contains supplementary documents for emacs. See the description below for more information on how to locate the source tree for a given public domain software product. Complete Sun Solaris documentation is available via the Web at this URL: http://docs.sun.com

If you are having trouble understanding how to use the systems, there is a lab-op available to help in each of the third floor labs. If your troubles are due to hardware or software failures in the systems or network, you should file a trouble report at http://www.cs.colostate.edu/cgi-bin/trouble.pl. The program will prompt you for all the information required by the systems folks to solve the problem. If things are so messed up that you cannot log in or get a browser up, report the problem to a lab-op or locate a system administrator as described below.

Lamar and holly are not Computer Science machines but belong to Academic Computing and Network services. For help with problems on these machines, send e-mail to consult@lamar.colostate.edu.

The systems people are located on the third floor of the University services center, in rooms 312 and 313. You can also reach them via e-mail to sna@cs.colostate.edu, or telephone at 491-5305. Faculty may obtain the administrator's home phone numbers from the file ~info/emergency.

Generally, we try to keep all systems up all the time. There is no regularly scheduled down time. However, sometimes we need to take systems or even the entire network down for maintenance. We try to schedule this at non- disruptive times. Down times are announced only in the csu.cs.systems news-group. Regular reading of this group is highly recommended.

The hours are posted at the front of the labs. The labs are closed during semester breaks, but dial-in facilities remain available.

A complete list of CS machines is given in the file ~info/machines. Those listed as "general" are available for general use. Others are available only to faculty and/or graduate students.

The "rup" command returns the current load average for most CS machines. For further information consult the rup(1) man page.

Generally speaking, such a program should be run in such a way as to minimize its impact on other users. This means initially choosing a machine with a small load as described above. Additionally, it is mandatory social etiquette that such jobs be run using a priority of 19. To reset your process priority do

renice +19 pid

User files and home directories are shared among all department Unix systems via NFS (the Network File System protocol) and NIS (the Network Information System protocol). Put more simply, no matter which Unix machine you log into, you will find your same home directory and same set of files. User files are all located in directories of the form, /s/SERVER/DISK/CATEGORY/NAME, where

Directories having a CATEGORY of "nobackup," are not backed up and are available on a "use at your own risk" basis. All other categories are backed up nightly to tape.

You can also map these directories from Windows PCs. (See section 11 below.)

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3.05) What are the naming conventions used on the CS subnet?

Computers are named after musical composers (e.g., mozart), X-terminals after compositions (e.g., bolero), and printers after instruments (e.g., guitar).

Internet addresses ending with "cs.colostate.edu" are all components of our subnet, for example mozart.cs.colostate.edu. The "cs.colostate.edu" suffix can usually be omitted on references local to our subnet.

A (partial) list of software packages is given in the file ~info/software. Most locally supported software is installed in the /usr/local directory on each system. One can also get an idea of what is available by browsing both this directory, and /usr/local/bin.

Systems source code is generally stored in trees rooted at /s/*/*/src. Source trees for many of the utilities found in /usr/local, are found in /s/parsons/f/src/local. The subtree associated with a given utility, is often rooted at a directory having the same name as the utility. For instance, the source code for /usr/local/bin/gcc is found in /s/parsons/f/src/local/bin/gcc. For further information see the description above of the CS file system structure.

On most machines, use the following command: uname -a -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4.01) How do I change my password?

You can change your password using the normal "passwd" command on any department linux machine. The command assists you in choosing a secure password, thereby enhancing security for everybody. The passwd command is disabled on the Sun Solaris machines, because it is not as secure as the linux version. (Also see 4.08)

Send mail to sna@cs.colostate.edu to request that your shell be changed. The change cannot be performed with chfn because of incompatibilities among various machines' implementation of the NIS protocol. The available shells are listed below:

Send mail to sna@cs.colostate.edu to request that your finger information be changed. The change cannot be performed with chfn because of incompatibilities among various machines' implementation of the NIS protocol.

The default startup files (which are provided in the home directories of newly created accounts) may be copied from ~info/dot.files. These files provide a basic template which works in our environment, and may serve as a starting point for your own individual modifications.

In general, the files in your home directory that begin with "." are used to set up parameters and miscellaneous settings before starting related utilities and functions. The following start-up files are executed or interpreted at the beginning of the sessions listed:

Generally speaking, your account will remain active as long as you are either enrolled as a Computer Science major or as another major taking CS classes. Other student accounts are removed twice annually, at the beginning of the Fall and Spring semesters. E-mail will be sent to accounts about to expire, several weeks before they are disabled.

No. Your account is for your use only. Accounts used by anyone other than the designated user may be suspended or revoked.

telnet and rlogin are insecure. We've replaced them with ssh(1) and slogin(1).

Create a public/private key pair using the following commands, and leave the pass-phrase empty when ssh-keygen prompts for it:

WARNING: If you change your password because you think your account has been compromised, you should also run these commands again. (The attacker may have stolen your ssh keys.)

For further information see the man page for ssh-keygen.

The following are popular FREE versions of the SSH protocol suite:

No! PC hard drives should be regarded as temporary work space only. PC disks are scrubbed periodically without warning as space needs to be freed. Store your data on ZIP, floppy, or your Unix home directory.

The CS Department systems group performs daily backups on all user-data stored on the three Department file-servers: bach, chopin, and parsons. Backups are performed every day in the very early hours of the morning, This means that if your data is lost on a given day, we can probably restore it to its state at midnight the day before.

WE DO NOT BACK UP DESK-TOP SYSTEMS. With desk-top Unix systems this is not a concern, because the network is architected such that user files are automatically stored on the servers. However, Microsoft systems (PCs) put some burden of data-integrity on the user. When using a PC, it is important to take one of three steps to make sure your data is backed up:

The tape-cycle for daily backups covers approximately the most recent three months. Additionally, an end-of-semester archive is performed three times a year, at the end of each semester, for long-term file recovery.

Backups are normally run each morning beginning at 1:00am. If the file was not on the system at that time, we CANNOT recover the file. Recovered files will be in the state they were in at the time of last backup. To request recovery of a file, run the trouble program (http://www.cs.colostate.edu/cgi-bin/trouble.pl)) which will prompt you for all the information necessary to recover the file.

Note, the backup/recovery service is only for recovery of files in an emergency situation. It is not to be relied on as an archival service. There is no guarantee that your files will be recoverable.

Use secure FTP, which is included with any SSH client. Either type

         sftp machine.cs.colostate.edu

from your UNIX/Linux machine, or use the Secure File Transfer feature included with your Windows SSH client (both available free for academic use from http://www.ssh.com).

Traditional FTP has been disabled on all except one machine on the Computer Science subnet. If you have to use FTP, then connect to

         ftp.cs.colostate.edu

Alternatively, you can do one of the following:

• Use samba over a dial-up connection. For further information see ~info/offsite-samba.
• Transfer the files to a department PC or Mac via zip or floppy, then use samba as outlined in step 9.02 above, or ftp.
• Use the mtools utilities with a floppy drive on a SparcStation. For further information see the Unix manual pages for mtools, mread, mwrite, mdir, etc.

Unless a special allocation has been approved for you through a Computer Science professor, allocations are as follows:

Please also note that total quota allocations exceed the size(s) of the disk(s). This means that if everybody uses their entire allocation, the disk will fill up. So please try to stay well below your personal allocation.

You will receive daily warning messages if you exceed your allocation. Failure to remedy the situation after several days of repeated warnings will result in the suspension of your computer account.

Enter the following commands:

This du command returns an integer value representing the total number of blocks you are currently using in your home directory. The -k option requests output in 1024 byte blocks instead of the default of 512 byte blocks.

cd; du -sk * .??* | sort -rn | more

This command lists the usage for each of your subdirectories.

Note: The .netscape directory and the Common Desktop Enviroment Trash can are often the culprits.

Enter one of the following commands (you can cut and paste the command lines from your browser into your terminal window):

if you are on a Sun machine:

         /usr/local/bin/find ~/ -printf "%k Kbytes %h/%f\n" | sort +0nr | head

if you are on a Linux machine:

         find ~/ -printf "%k Kbytes %h/%f\n" | sort -nr | head

This will list the 10 largest files in your home directory, in decreasing order of their size.

Bring up netscape, go into edit/preferences/advanced/cache and reduce the disk cache size. The default is five megabytes. Two megabytes is probably a good compromise. Over time, netscape also accumulates a lot of useless stuff in other files. If your netscape directory gets excessively large, you might want to simply exit Netscape, save your bookmarks and preferences files, remove the entire .netscape directory tree, restart Netscape and move your bookmarks and preferences files back.

There is also a button in this dialog box to clear the disk cache immediately. Click on the button and answer the questions, and the disk cache is supposed to be cleared out. Unfortunately, versions of Netscape for Unix don't work very well, so you might have to go into your .netscape/cache/* directories and remove cached files manually:

Double-click on the trashcan symbol on the far right of the CDE Front Panel (at the bottom of the screen). From the 'File' menu, select 'Shred.'

We support the vendors' primary window manager on each hardware platform. Hence, the following window managers are supported on their respective platforms:

A variety of other window managers are also available on most machines, on a "use at your own risk" basis.

Generally speaking, Computer Science Department machines are shared resources. It is Department policy that they not be locked for exclusive use for long periods of time. They may be locked for brief periods (of five minutes or so) if you are called away briefly from your work-station, for instance.

The soft limits for undergraduates are 35 pages per print job and 75 pages per week. These are limits of excess, not allocations. You should try to keep your printing well below these limits.

CS Department printers are for bona fide department-related work only.

Use the following command on HP machines:

where MAN-FILE is the unformatted manual page (i.e., from a "man" vs "cat" directory). On HP machines, the manual files are typically compressed. You can uncompress the file as follows:

Then print the resulting tmpfile.

On Suns using CDE, you can print man pages from the Man Page Viewer. You can find this in the Desktop_Apps folder.

To cancel you print job, you need to check the job's status in order to get the job number.

To check on the status of your print job, type 'lpstat '. You will get output that looks something like this:

To cancel your job, type 'cancel '. To cancel the job above, one would type:

By default, double-sided (duplex) printers use both sides of the paper. Since single-sided printing doubles our paper costs, it should only be selected when absolutely necessary. Single-sided printing may be selected as described below.

Use the "-o sides=one-sided" option with the lpr command. For instance:

> lpr -Pguitar -o sides=one-sided myfile

For the printer in question, go into the "Properties/Advanced/Printing Defaults" menu and select "Flip on Short Edge" or "Flip on Long Edge."

Setting the default printer is done as follows:

Dial up service is through Academic Computing and Network Services (ACNS). Information is available via the ACNS Modems Web Page.

Note: Initial dial-up authentication is based on your CSU EID, not your CS login.

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9.02) How do I connect to the CS Department's wireless network?

The CS Department's wireless network is configured as part of the campus wireless network. So once your machine is configured to work on the department's wireless, it should work most anywhere on campus. For further information on setting up wireless access, consult the ACNS Wireless Web Page. For information on setting up wireless access from a Linux machine, consult the Netsec webpage, "Using the CSU VPN in Linux".

Note: wireless authentication is based on your CSU EID, not your CS login.

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9.03) If I'm connecting from an off-campus ISP, is there anything special I should do?

Traveling personnel and those who use outside ISPs (e.g., cable-modems, AOL, and Earthlink) for remote access can benefit from the VPN client. The VPN client will ensure a secure connection between your computer and CSU. It will also authenticate your connection to use certain on-campus services, such as SMTP. For further information, see the ACNS VPN Web Page.

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10.01) On which machine can I read my electronic mail?

Mail addressed to you anywhere on our subnet gets routed to the department mail server, mail.cs.colostate.edu. You should configure your mailer-reader of choice to use the IMAP protocol to access your mail from this machine.

The procedure for routing your mail to a different server is described below.

Please note that mail.cs.colostate.edu is the mail server for all machines on the Computer Science subnet (*.cs.colostate.edu). Please do not attempt to direct your mail to a different CS department machine, as it may cause your mail to be lost.

If, on the other hand, you'd like your mail to go to a remote machine outside of the Computer Science subnet, you may do so by creating a .forward file at the top-level of your home directory. To create the .forward file, log into any CS Department Unix machine (such as faure.cs.colostate.edu) and enter a command similar to the following:

         echo "JoeSixpack@aol.com" > .forward

where "JoeSixpack@aol.com" is the new target address. Please assure that the destination address is fully qualfied.

After setting up a .forward, test it to make sure it is working correctly. If in doubt about any of this, send your address change request to sna@cs.colostate.edu.

Your e-mail address is LOGIN@cs.colostate.edu where LOGIN is your login. On our local subnet your e-mail address may be abbreviated to simply your login.

The NTTP server(it is maintained by ACNS) is news.colostate.edu.

The first message means the news server is not accessible for some reason. Excessive or spurious "Bogus Newsgroup" messages indicate that the spool directory on the news server is full. Usually, the best thing to do is wait a while until these conditions clear, and try again.

The news server is maintained by ACNS, not the CS Department. Urgent problems regarding the news server should be directed to consult@lamar.colostate.edu. Problems with the news readers themselves, such as rn, trn, strn, or xrn, should be directed to sna.

In your home directory create a subdirectory named public_html. Only files stored under that directory are accessible via the ~ operator from the Web. In your public_html directory create a file called index.html. This will be your home page, accessible via the ~ operator. For example, if user foo sets up such a file structure his home page file, ~foo/public_html/index.html, will be accessible via the URL, http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~foo. You may also store other files under your public_html directory and reference them from your home page, or directly via a WWW URL. For example, the file ~foo/public_html/bar.html will be accessible via the URL, http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~foo/bar.html.

Your public_html directory must have permissions set to 755.
Any html file which you want to be diplayed must have permissions set to 644.

The department enforces security constraints on CGI scripts via the suEXEC wrapper. For further information log into a department Unix machine an read the text file ~info/cgi-suexec.

For information on how to set up password protection for your web-pages, log onto a department Unix machine and consult the text-file, ~info/htpasswd

For incoming mail use mail.cs.colostate.edu

Your outgoing SMTP server depends on the location of your mailer's internet connection. If your mailer is connected directly to the CS subnet use mail.cs.colostate.edu. If you're connected from some other location on campus, including the ACNS modem pool, then use yuma.acns.colostate.edu. If you're using an outside service-provider, consult the provider to obtain the outgoing SMTP server.

The configuration outlined below will store all your mail folders, including your inbox on the server where it is safe from both data-loss and other users eyes.

In Messenger go into "Edit / Preferences / Mail & Newsgroups" and the following sub-options:

- select "Identity" and enter your email address as "LOGIN@cs.colostate.edu", where LOGIN is your Unix login.

- select "Mail Servers", then "Add", and enter your mail server name (as per item 10.01 above) and your Unix login. Do not select "Remember password".

- select "Mail Servers", then "Edit" and the following sub-options:

- select "General" and choose "IMAP Server" as your "Server_Type" and your Unix login as your "User Name". (Do not select "Remember password".)

- select IMAP and choose "When I delete a message: Remove it immediately" and "Clean up Inbox on exit".

- select "Advanced" and for "IMAP server directory" enter "Mail/"

Items not specified should be left with the default values.

We use ACNS's server to do this, therefore you must have an account with ACNS. If you are a student or faculty, ACNS provides this service free of charge. Go here to signup.

Once you have an account with ACNS, follow these steps:

1.) Go to Edit->Preferences in Netscape.

2.) Highlight the "Roaming User" option on the left so that the cute little triangle points down.

3.) Select "Enable Roaming Access for this Profile" at the top and enter the login name of your ACNS account for the "User Name" box at the bottom

4.) Highlight the "Server Information" option directly under the "Roaming User" option on the left.

5.) Select "HTTP Server" and enter the following url:

where "LOGIN" is the your ACNS login

6.) Highlight the "Item Selection" option directly under the "Server Information" option on the left.

7.) Make sure the "History", "Java Security", and "Certificates and Private Keys" options are NOT selected. The rest of the options should be selected.

8.) Click "OK" at the bottom of the dialog and restart Netscape

9.) When prompted for a password after restarting Netscape, enter your ACNS account password.

By default, Pine will use a subdirectory of your home directory to store various mail folders. This directory is usually called ~/mail. Pine can access your inbox and this directory entirely over IMAP, allowing you to read email from multiple locations transparently.

The following steps are needed to do this:

• Open up ~/.pinerc in your favorite editor;
• Change the line user-domain= to user-domain=cs.colostate.edu
• Change the line smtp-server= to:
  • smtp-server=yuma.acns.colostate.edu if you are using an ACNS dialup line, or
  • smtp-server=mail.cs.colostate.edu otherwise
• Change the line inbox-path= to inbox-path={mail.cs.colostate.edu}inbox
• Change the line folder-collections= to folder-collections=Main {mail.cs.colostate.edu}mail/[]
  This will tell pine to access all mail folders in the ~/mail subdirectory of your home directory via the IMAP server, enabling you to see them even when running pine from outside the Computer Science department. Setting this option does not always show up in the pine configuration menu, which is the reason why editing ~/.pinerc directly is recommended.

Also, please refer to the sample Pine config file in ~info/dot.files/.pinerc for further information.

You need a ~/.mailcap file in your home directory. This file contains lines pairing up content types with helper applications that know how to view them.

Copy ~info/dot.files/.mailcap to your home directory. Currently, this will enable you to view Acrobat PDF files with acroread, postscript files with gv, and Word files with OpenOffice, from both Pine and from Netscape.

Please note that you will need to do a user installation of OpenOffice before being able to view Word documents. Please refer to ~info/OpenOffice*.README for instructions on how to do this.

To map your Unix directory from a department Windows machine (i.e., a machine in the cs-win domain), right click on "My Computer", then select "Map network drive". Enter a path of "\\unix\LOGIN", where LOGIN is your Unix login.

Mapping your Unix directory from home involves a little more configuration work. For further information read the unix text-file ~info/offsite-samba.

Every Windows machine should run a virus scanner, such as Mcafee or Norton Anti-Virus, and the virus definitions should be kept up to date. Under the CSU campus site license, Norton antivirus is available free of charge to CSU students, faculty, and staff. You can pick up a copy from Room 224 Webber Hall.

Spyware and Adware are applications that are installed onto a computer, often surreptitiously or as part of another useful application. Spyware tracks and reports a user's activities. Adware causes random popup adds to appear on the users system. No only are these activates annoying to users but these applications are often poorly written and so cause a wide range of other problems with the user's system.

There are several applications that aid in the removal of both Spyware and Adware. The two applications we recommend to try first are Spybot and AdAware. These two applications cover a slightly different set of issues and so it is recommended that both be run.

Spybot: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

AdAware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/

There is a third tool that for people who are experiencing trouble with IE and have some understanding of the inner workings of windows. That is a program called HijackThis: http://www.spychecker.com/program/hijackthis.html

Warning: If after having this tool scan your system you are unsure of what to remove, it is best not to proceed.

Using the Apple Finder "Go" list, select "Connect to Server" and enter one of the following as the Server Address:

smb://smb.cs.colostate.edu

-or-

afp://afp.cs.colostate.edu

The first option uses an SMB connection (via samba). You will need to authenticate using your CS-WIN windows domain password This is probably the preferred method.

The second option uses an AppleTalk connection (via netatalk), with your unix password. Occasionally, netatalk can become confused by obsolete or corrupted metadata. To clear out these stale metatdata files, run the script

~info/mac/clearMacMetaData

Updated metadata files will be created the next time you mount your CS Department Unix account from a mac through netatalk.

The fix is a low level one. Edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and add the following line:

This tells your Mac to poll the CS cups print server for a list of department printers. Those printers will show up under a "Shared Printers" option in the Mac print dialoge box.

After setting this up, your machine will need to be configured to attach to a CS Department network connection in order to see the printers. Also, whenever connecting or reconnecting to the CS network, if you do not see the printers you may need to reboot your machine after attaching.

Using Mac OS 10.3, panther, one can now easily use SSL with mail. That is the good news. The bad news, the process of getting and retaining a local certificate is somewhat involved and has at least one known major pitfall.

To start, in the advanced settings for the IMAP account, there is a check box for SSL. Check it. Then, the next time you start email, follow the instructions here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25593

And now, the big gotcha. If Mail.app is pointing to the inbox of the IMAP account whose certificate you are attempting to copy, Mail will freeze (apparently permanently). The fix is simple. Make sure to have Mail.app default to another folder, for example the inbox of a different email account. If you do this and then restart Mail.app, all will proceed smoothly and as described in the little instruction set from Apple given above.

After physically mounting the floppy, enter the following command:

mount /mnt/floppy

umount /mnt/floppy

Note: Be sure you are no longer in the /mnt/floppy directory or you will get a "device busy" error when attempting to unmount.

From the command line do:

         /usr/local/bin/fdumount

This will force the floppy to be unmounted, and you will be able to mount your own.

After physically plugging in the device, it should automatically be mounted. Run the command:

df -k

Please don't forget to unmount when you're done:

Right click on the USB on your desktop and select 'Unmount Volume'

Note: Be sure you are no longer in the /media/USR\ MEMORY directory or you will get a "Cannot unmount volume" error when attempting to unmount.

Note: You may need to re-format the device on a linux machine with a FAT16 partition. Devices formatted on a windows system may not mount correctly on Linux. But devices formatted on a Linux system will work on either. For further inforamtion see the unix text file, ~info/usb-stick-format

The Calendar Manager is designed to store its data files (your data) on whichever machine you run it on initially. If you want this data backed up, you'll need to take steps to make sure the data files are instead stored on chico:

• dtcm - select Options from the File menu
• select Display Settings from the drop-down box
• set User Calendar Location to 'chico'
• set Initial Calendar View to '@chico' replace with your username.
• cm - select Properties from the Edit menu (use right mouse button)
• select the Display Settings category (use right mouse button)
• set User Calendar Location to 'chico'
• set Initial Calendar View to '@chico' replace with your username.