When you're done here, please also read through the FAQ.
Please read and understand the cluster security policy
Since the home directories, as well as the Run II CVS tree reside on
PDSF, you must first have a PDSF account. To get one, go to the PDSF homepage and fill out the
application form for a new account. When your account is active the
system manager can create your
CDF linux account.
Please note that this does not mean that the linux
computers are part of the PDSF cluster. They form a seperate system,
but the home directories physically reside on PDSF, so they
need to know who you are.
Do not use any easily guessed thing. The passwords are checked on a regular basis, if yours fails some simple tests you will be forced to change it. Use at least 8 characters; a mixture of letters, numbers and non alphanumeric characters (such as # or %) is best. Do not use the same passwords on different machines. Do not reuse passwords.
Good passwords can often be generated by choosing a phrase, and using the first letter from each word. The password will be easily remembered, but very hard to guess.
For example, "Don't use this as your password, silly", would generate the password dutayp,s. Note that I've included the comma to make it harder to guess. You may also want to include some simple, easy to remember substitutions, like du7ayp,s, where I've replaced the t with a 7 because they kind of look alike to me.
Your account is valid on any of the linux machines. These are named cdflx1 through cdflx10, and cdflt1 through cdflt3. If you have a machine on your desk, of course it makes sense to do most of your work on that machine.
As described in the basic security policy, you may not give your linux hostname as your email address. Mail addressed directly to any linux machine will not be delivered. It is, however, possible to use the linux machines to read and send mail. See the part of this document on Mail for details.
There are several distinct storage areas available. Most of your
personal files should be stored in your home directory. This area is
backed up, but is limited to 500MB. Type quota to see your
current disk usage.
You may also store files on the local scratch spaces, named
/scratch-local. Each of these scratch spaces is extremely large and
is available only from the machine that hosts it. That is
/scratch-local on cdflx1 is not the same as /scratch-local on cdflx2,
nor is it visible to users of cdflx2 (or any other nodes). These
areas are not backed up.
Finally, you may use the PDSF data vault. This area is visible only
from PDSF itself. It is visible from PDSF nodes as /auto/cdf
The group has a total of 28GB of space in this area. This area is not
backed up.
The primary source of help is the Unix manual, invoked by the command man The command help gives some information about the shell commands. Most Linux documentation is held in info format. See info info for more details. A convenient way of navigating info is from within emacs. Use C-h i to invoke info mode.
KDE, the default graphical desktop environment on our system, has its own graphical help browser. This tool ,called kdehelp and startable from the desktop panel, provides browsing and searching of the KDE manuals, as well as the UNIX man pages and GNU info pages.
There is extensive documentation in /usr/doc and /usr/doc/HOWTO. Linux has many FAQs and other helpful resources on the net.
You must use ssh to connect to any of our machines. telnet is available from a limited number of X-terminals. You may ftp from any of our machines to any other machine. ftp to our machines is restricted to within LBL. Note that this does not mean you can't transfer files in both directions. You may need to use "put" instead of "get." Use scp where possible. In the future telnet may be disabled altogether. Please learn how to use ssh before this happens. SSH should be installed on all laboratory UNIX systems, and in particular is available on our SGIs. You may need to run "module load ssh" to run ssh and scp from an SGI.
Please see this guide for more information about ssh.
From an X-terminal, you can just telnet and then open applications on your X-terminal. Alternatively you can use XDCMP to query any SGI. You will then be presented with a login window.
On a workstation just enter your username and password, the window manager then takes over.
By popular request the default shell is tcsh. The bash, csh, zsh, and ksh are also available. Use chsh to change your shell. If you use tcsh, please take care when editing your .login and .cshrc files. These files are shared with the PDSF nodes, so editing them may damage your PDSF environment.
The default desktop environment on our system is called KDE. You may wish to read the guide to KDE and its window manager, kwm. The fvwm, fvwm2, twm, and Afterstep window managers are also available, but these are all quite minimal compared to KDE. If you dislike KDE, edit your ~/.Xclients file to start the window manager of your choice. If you remove the ~/.Xclients file entirely (or, better, just rename it), you will get a customized version of fvwm2. This is probably your best second choice.
Linux is still UNIX, so all the familiar UNIX editors are available.
These include xemacs, emacs, vim, and vi. The lastest versions of
xemacs and emacs have a greatly improved customization system. Go to
Options->Customize in Xemacs, or Help->Customize in GNU Emacs to do
use it. Of course you may still edit your .emacs file by hand.
Whether you prefer to use Xemacs or GNU Emacs is
largely a matter of taste. Xemacs has two mail readers, a built in web
browser, support for cvs, make and a boatload of other bells and
whistles.
One advantage of using emacs (either flavor) is that it runs both
under X and in textmode, so you can use the same familiar commands
whether you're at home or at your workstation.
vim is an improved version of the UNIX vi editor that we all cursed in years past. Some people like it. Some people like okra.
In addition there is xedit, a very minimal editor that runs only under X and uses athena widgets (those ugly flat buttons and powerful but confusing scrollbars).
You may also wish to try kwrite. It runs only under X, and supports syntax highlighting. It's part of KDE, but you don't have to run the full KDE environment to use it. Find it in /opt/kde/bin.
The above are all text editors. If you want a word processor with the ability to exchange documents with MS PCs and Macs, you have a choice. There are applix and StarOffice, which will be installed on all of the workstations. See the FAQ for more information.
You should register with the LBL EPO to receive an email address of the form YourName@lbl.gov. As far as mail clients go, Pine is not too bad and works on all terminals. If you use EMACS for editing then you can use it to deal with mail. Make sure that you understand what format your mail reader is using; mail read and stored in one mail reader may not be readable from another. Before using ``reply'' in any mailer make sure that you understand the difference between reply and Reply.
You should read the FAQ on mail.
The /home is backed up daily. Space in /home is limited, so you will need to use the /scratch areas for very large files. Use the command quota to see your disk quota on /home. Since /home physically resides on PDSF, it is not possible for me to increase your disk quota (which is 500MB). See here for some hints on using backed up space effectively.
All the machines have large scratch disk areas, named /scratch-local which are available for general use. They are not backed up. Files left there are not removed automatically by the system. If the space becomes filled, users who have stuff there will be notified.
For jobs run on our workstations, background your job, or better yet, use at, cron and batch. Use man to learn how to use these utilities. Be sure to use nice so that your job does not hog the machine resources.
For Run II, intensive data analysis will be submitted to the PDSF system. You may use LSF for this. From an interactive pdsf node use the command 'bsub' to submit batch jobs. Documentation for LSF is available at the PDSF web site cited above.
``Running Linux'' by Matt Welsh and Lar Kaufman
(O'Reilly)
``Unix for VMS Users'' by Philip Bourne (Digital
Press)
``Unix for Dummies'' by Levine and Young (IDG)
``Learning the Unix Operating system'' by G. Todino,
J. Strank and J Peek
``Learning GNU Emacs'' by Debra Cameron, Bill Rosenblatt
and Eric Raymond.
`` What you need to know when you cannof find your UNIX
system administrator"' by Linda Mui (O'Reilly)...