|
(We also still handle queries about the legacy domains dai.ed.ac.uk, cogsci.ed.ac.uk, dcs.ed.ac.uk, aiai.ed.ac.uk, anc.ed.ac.uk and others.)
All mail you receive about the ticket will be from a mail address which is used just for that ticket. We can only keep a proper track of your correspondence if it's sent to the correct address for the ticket. Doing this is in fact quite easy: all you have to do is reply to the initial auto-reply message mentioned above.
One of the staff will take "ownership" of the ticket. Sometimes it will also be assigned to a "queue" - which really means that it's being handed to a particular team of people to deal with. When either of these things happens you will be automatically mailed.
To contact the person that's dealing with the ticket, reply to that ticket's auto-reply email.
The user tends not see the behind the scenes activity on a ticket, often because computing staff are working out how best to deal with your request, rather than that nothing is happening at all. You can see Support's record of the ticket, including all information about what's been done so far, directly in RT on the web. These instructions tell you how to go about doing this.
If you need to escalate the priority on a ticket please see the escalation procedures.
If there are issues you have already solved please let us know as we may deem it appropriate to add the information to this FAQ for other users.
| ~/.brc | is executed every time a new shell starts. This file is used, for example, to set aliases, which do not automatically propagate to subshells. |
| ~/.benv | is executed every time a shell starts in a new environment, such as when an X window is opened onto a new machine. This file is used, for example, to set environmental variables. |
| ~/.bprofile | is executed on login. |
| ~/.inputrc | is used to set the key bindings for command line editing operations. |
You can add directories to bash's command search path using setpath. This sets up the search path in the right order.
For full details on the Informatics bash startup mechanism, see the bashdefenv man page.
Local information about the Beowulf computing clusters is in the Beowulf section of the systems pages.
You can find details of the Corpora and other Language and Speech data that we have on line at http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/resources/corpora/
A "disk quota" is a maximum limit on the amount of disk space which can be used. Many accounts have a disk quota on their home directory. (Yes, scholars, it should strictly be a "quotum" since "quota" is the plural, but let's just use the normal terminology.)
A disk quota consists of two limits:
We recommend that undergrad and MSc students not use more than this amount of disk space, not counting the main final year projects:
| Course | Soft limit (Kb) | Hard limit (Kb) |
| first year undergrad | 100Mb | 110MB |
| second year undergrad | 200Mb | 110MB |
| third year undergrad | 300MB | 310MB |
| fourth year undergrad | 400Mb | 410MB |
| MSc | 400Mb | 410MB |
Staff and research postgrads: if you have a quota which needs increasing, contact us to say how much more space you need.
Fourth Year Undergrads and MSc students: we will only increase your disk quota if you need more space for your project. Please ask your project supervisor to contact us with information on how much more space you will need.
Please note that we do not increase quota to accommodate coursework. The disk quotas required for coursework are agreed with teaching staff before the start of the academic year.
A good start is to use the "du -k" command. Bring up a shell window, type "cd" to go to your home directory, and then type "du -k | more". "du -k" shows you how much disk space, in kilobytes, is being used by the files in each directory in your home directory.
If you do this you'll probably see that a lot of space is taken up by files in your netscape or mozilla cache directories. You can tell netscape or mozilla not to do this. To do this: start netscape or mozilla; from its Edit menu choose Preferences; click the arrow next to Advanced; click Cache; and reduce the size of your Disk Cache to 500 Kilobytes or less. Also click the button marked Clear Disk Cache Now.
Sometimes, however, Mozilla (and also Konqueror - used by KDE's help system)
do not abide by their cache settings very well, so one solution is to set
the cache directories to point at /dev/null. This will not cause problems for
these problems, they'll just think they have zero cache - which makes little
difference with our network. To do this you need to run the following four
commands in a shell window. Please note that the "Random_Directory" under ~/.mozilla/firefox
will be something
like lzpk165o.default but it's different for every user.
rm -Rf ~/.kde/share/apps/kio_http/cache
ln -s /dev/null ~/.kde/share/apps/kio_http/cache
rm -Rf ~/.mozilla/firefox/Random_Directory/Cache
ln -s /dev/null ~/.mozilla/Random_Directory/Cache
You have to delete the original cache before you can create the link. Other directories you can
delete are
".adobe", ".kde.preDICE" and "Desktop.preDICE" if you have them, use the commands:
rm -rf ~/.adobe
rm -rf ~/.Dotfiles/RH9/kde.preDICE
rm -rf ~/Dotfiles/RH9/Desktop.preDICE
Please be VERY sure that you name the directory after the -rf as it is possible
to delete too much!
Finally, go to your each of your practicals directories in turn, and tidy up a bit. Delete files whose names end in the "~" character. Those are extra backup copies made automatically when you edit a file. Delete files with names ending in .class - those can be re-made from the .java files later. Do "file *" on the files that remain. This tells you what each file does. You can probably delete files marked as "executable" files, because these can also be re-made later on if you want to, just by compiling the practical again. Finally, type "gzip *". This compresses the files which are left so that they take up less space. When you next want to use the files you'll first need to uncompress them again using "gunzip".
You can also keep an eye on how much of your quota you have used with the "quota -v" command. This tells you eight numbers. In order, these are:
ssh software. (See How do I access my
account from outside Informatics? for more on ssh.)
cp, the Linux
file-copying command, except that it works over ssh
connections. As with cp you have to name the
file's source and destination in the one command - it's not
interactive. For example, to transfer a file called
interesting.txt from your DICE account to your home machine, you might
use a command such as scp interesting.txt fred@myhome.xyzzy.net:/home/fred/stuffftp, the file transfer command,
except that it works over ssh connections. It has an
interactive mode which allows you to browse through
directories at the destination. For example, user bertha might
transfer files from a machine somewhere else on the internet
to her DICE home directory with the commandsftp bertha@staff.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk
student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk instead.
scp or sftp (see the previous question).
To unpack a tarball:
tar zxvf filename
To list the files in a tarball:
tar ztvf filename
To make a new tarball fred.tar.gz from a directory fred:
tar zcvf fred.tar.gz fred
or
tar cvf fred.tar fred ; gzip fred.tar
If all those cvfs and zxvfs make your head spin, refer to this table, which explains what they all mean:
| c | create an archive |
| f filename | the name of the archive file |
| t | table of contents: tell me what's in an archive |
| v | verbose: tell me what's going on |
| x | extract from an archive |
| z | put the archive through gzip |
Switching off the monitor doesn't break anything, but can confuse other users of the machine!
To leave the floppy drive in a usable state for other users right-click on the Floppy icon and select "unmount" before removing the floppy disc.
If you want to access the floppy from the command line:-
To list the contents:
mdir a:
To copy a file from floppy:
mcopy a:file.ext unixfile
To copy a file to floppy:
mcopy unixfile a:file.ext
To put an msdos filesystem on a floppy:
mformat a:
You might need to low level format the floppy first:
fdformat /dev/fd0H1440
k3b.
Under FC3
The files are normally available automatically as an icon on the desktop.
Under FC53
Under FC3, udev and hal created mount points in /media and respective entries in /etc/fstab for removeable media devices such as cdroms and hot-plugged usb sticks.
This functionality is now handled by the window manager (only KDE, Gnome and XFCE supported) using gnome-mount. If you aren't running a supported window manager you can mount and unmount, as a normal, user using the gnome-mount and gnome-umount commands. Note, however, that you must have a current X session to do this; it won't work from a virtual terminal.
eg gnome-mount -d /dev/cdrom
The "homedir" command tells you where your files are kept. For instance:
[pirrip]cc: homedir
cc (Chris Cooke) : bigga.dcs : u8/cc : free 271M (used 97%)
This says that the home directory of user cc is on a machine called
bigga.dcs, in a disc partition called u8. It also
says that there's currently 271MB free on that disc partition.
Note: you won't necessarily be able to use all of that free space, because of quotas. See the disk quotas section for details.
See the disk quotas section.
It means that your Kerberos ticket has run out. Your Kerberos ticket is what gives you permission to use a range of network services; it proves to them that you are who you say you are. You're automatically given a ticket when you login. A ticket is valid for a few hours and then it expires.
You get a ticket when you login. You can get a new one at any time by typing renc in a terminal window.
You can also get a new ticket by locking your screen with the xscreensaver program then unlocking it again. If you tend to leave yourself logged in for long periods of time, consider using the xscreensaver overnight. When you unlock the screen you'll be issued with a fresh ticket, valid for another ten hours. For more details on using xscreensaver look at its man page.
Note that xscreensaver is the default screensaver under Gnome. It is
not the default under KDE and to make KDE use xscreensaver requires a
bit more manual config but it isn't that difficult. You
have to disable the normal screensaver using the control dialogs
and then add a xscreensaver.sh file to .kde/AutoStart which looks like:
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/X11/xscreensaver -nosplash
You then have to logout and login again to enable. You can setup how
xscreensaver works using the "xscreensaver-demo" command. You have to
enable lock screen.
A ticket lasts for ten hours before it expires. You can find out when your ticket will expire, or if it has already expired, by typing klist in a terminal window. It is intended that the default ticket lifetime will be extended to sixteen hours for the start (or soon after the start) of the 2004/5 academic session.
Authentication is the process of identifying yourself to the network and is fundamental to the security of computer systems. Without knowing who is requesting an operation it is hard to decide whether the operation should be allowed. Weak authentication systems are authentication by assertion and assume that services and machines cannot be compromised or spoofed and that network traffic cannot be monitored. Strong authentication systems that do not disclose secrets on the network and use encryption are becoming increasingly popular and important.
All Informatics sites used to use weak authentication, where passwords for login and applications (such as mail tools) travelled in clear text from client to server across the network. This kind of weak authentication is very common and has been used for many years in most UNIX installations. It is however completely unsuitable for authentication of users in un-trusted environments, which the increasing use of portable and self-managed machines is creating here.
Our requirement to combine the old user spaces from the pre-existing administrative domains into one single user space for the whole of Informatics means that new account management procedures have had to be developed, with a review of the security model. The sharing of services by sites across networks not managed directly by us, and support for more intermittently connected and self-managed machines, means there is even more reason to move away from machine and network trust; and we can no longer realistically condone the continued use of weak authentication. Hence an alternative technology and infrastructure must be sought.
Kerberos is a mature network authentication protocol. It is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications over an insecure network by using secret key cryptography. Kerberos was initially developed at MIT and is now an open standard controlled by the IETF. A free open source implementation is available from MIT and there are many commercial implementations. Microsoft has chosen Kerberos as their preferred authentication technology in Windows 2000 and .Net/Passport.
Kerberos has:
There is no real alternative to Kerberos for strong authentication, except through the use of a public key infrastructure (PKI). However PKI is relatively new technology and there is little that is mature enough to be trusted let alone deployed and distributed as a supported production system. Work is being done to add public key support to the Kerberos standard. One-time passwords are too inconvenient for the user to be a realistic internal alternative. The availability of a central Kerberos service that could also authenticate Win2k clients would be very desirable.
(This answer was adapted from one originally supplied by the Authorisation/Authentication team - thanks to Tim Colles, Simon Wilkinson and Roger Burroughes.)
If you're a member of staff or a research postgrad student, you may be able to connect your laptop to a network port in your office. Please contact Support first to arrange this.
Please never just unplug a computer from the network and plug in your laptop in its place.
We contribute some access points to the Edinburgh University wireless network. See the University's wireless network pages for more information about the network. We have a list of the locations of wireless access points in Informatics buildings.
Before you can use this service you must be registered with EASE. This is done by filling in the
form here.
The password requested is the one staff use for staffmail@ed or that staff, visitors or students use to logon in the EUCS
public labs. It is NOT your dice password. If staff or visitors do not know this password,
they should go to the nearest Support Office who can supply it. Students should speak to
the supervisors in the Public Labs.
Then follow the instructions for wireless registration here.
From outside Informatics: see How do I access my account from outside Informatics?
| Appleton Tower | Open all the time by swipe card access only. |
| Forrest Hill | Open all the time by swipe card access only. |
| JCMB | Building open 08:15 to 22:00 on weekdays, 09:00 to 19:00 at weekends, during term and vacation. Labs accessible by swipe card only. |
If you forget your DICE password please visit your local Support person with your matric card or other form of picture identification, or have your lab supervisor phone or email us. We will give you a new password, which must be changed immediately (to something very memorable for you which at the same time is very secure. See How do I choose a secure password? below.)
Support can sometimes help with a few other University passwords too: if you are a member of staff or a research postgraduate student, support can change your password for Active Directory, NDS or NT4. If you are an undergraduate or MSc student, please ask a demonstrator in a University public computing lab to do this for you.
Support cannot help with passwords for other non-Informatics services such as SMS and staffmail. For help with these and any other University-wide services please contact a lab demonstrator.
In some of these cases you will probably need to have support's assistance to get back into your account. For this follow the procedure noted in Forgotten Passwords above.
DO NOT TELL YOUR PASSWORD TO ANYONE
The machines in the Informatics computer labs are available on a "first come first served" basis. However, this means that a machine is only yours while you are working at it. Please do not go off to a lecture, lunch, etc., leaving the screen locked.
If there are no spare machines, and you find a machine that has been locked for 15 minutes or more, it is legitimate practice to end the login, so that you can use the machine yourself. In order to find out how long it has been locked, press the 'ctrl', 'alt' and 'f2' together. This will provide you with a text login prompt. Log in as normal and type:
who
to see who is using the machine. Then type the command
ps aux | grep lock
or
ps aux | grep *.kss
(for kde screen savers).
This will then show you how long the lock has been running.
Now
log out by typing 'exit' or pressing 'ctrl' 'd', then press
'ctrl','alt' and 'f7' together to get back to the locked screen.
If the user has been logged in for 15 minutes or more, you can press
the 'ctrl', 'alt' and 'backspace' keys together to end the locked
login session.
Look in your home directory for a directory called .mozilla/firefox
You will see a recent directoory with a name that is a random collection of letters and numbers - for example: mo482qpv.default
Look in this directory for a .parentlock file.
Note: you will have to use ls -a to see this hidden file.
Delete it and try running firefox again.
http://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/list-name
At the bottom of this page, click on the link to "Visit Subscriber List". Clicking on your own name will take you to your own personal page for this list, on which there exists a "password reminder" button. If the Subscriber list is also password protected, then you need to contact the list maintainer.
To request a list, contact support via the web form ,
http://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/list-name
The list-owner will then add or remove your from the list at their own discretion.
If you want a newsgroup to be created or removed, use the support web form detailing which group you'd like created/removed. Note we only have control over the eduni.inf.* hierarchy.
Some newsgroups are gatewayed to a corresponding mailing list. Some of this gatwaying is bi-directional, meaning that posts to the list end up in the newsgroup, and vice versa. However not all lists are like this, typically only @inf.ed.ac.uk hosted lists are bi-directional, and others (typically the historical eduni.dcs.* newsgroups) only gate one-way (from the list to the newsgroup).
Generally you can't tell which lists/newsgroups gates, and in which direction, if in doubt ask the mailing list maintainer, or contact the mail team via the support form.
There is some documentation for academic staff, tutors and demonstrators (anyone doing marking) on using the School's electronic practical submissions system.
printers program. For example, using the
-l switch will give you a list of available printers for
a specific Informatics site:
[vammala]toby: printers -l at at1 HP Laserjet 4200DTN [1200dpi] in 4.06 AT at2 HP4050N in Appleton Tower at3 HP 4200DTN - Level 2 Lab in AT at4 HP4200DTN in Appleton Tower at5 HP Laserjet 4200DTN [1200dpi] in 4.06 AT at6 HP 4200DTN - 5.10 AT at7 HP 4200DTN - Level 2 Room 4 (Kitchen) AT at8 HP 4200DTN - Forrest Hill A20 at9c HP Laserjet 4600DTN [colour] in 4.06 AT at10c HP Colour 4600DTN in AT 2.04 at11 HP Laserjet 4200DTN [1200dpi] in 4.10 AT at12c HP Inkjet 2880TN [vammala]toby:
printers program (details above), you can set your default
printer by using the following command:- echo "export PRINTER=printername" >> ~/.benv export PRINTER=printername in each open shell.
Use the command lpr -Pcl16 -Zsimplex,tray=Tray1 filename to send your job to the printer. This will tell the printer to take media from the multipurpose tray. Jobs that are sent to the printer by other users will not pick up your transparencies if they are not sent with the -Ztray=Tray1 option.
The slides for the colour laserwriter are quite costly! Please take care that your work is in its final form before using them.
When printing from a DICE or a legacy Solaris machine, use the -Ztransparency or -Zletterhead option.
Printing from a Mac or PC to letterhead or transparency on these printers usually involves setting "Paper source" or "Media Type" to either transparency or letterhead - this varies wildly between different operating systems and printer models.
Non-postscript jobs are dealt with by the informatics print filtering system, meaning essentially that the file type of the job is detected and a convertor is then used to convert the job into postscript prior to it being printed (e.g. PDF documents are converted to postscript using the acroread -toPostscript command). The print logs will give details of the command used to produce the postscript.
Printing from Macs or PCs on the other hand will most likely result in the postscript being generated before it is submitted to an Informatics print server (i.e. by the Mac or PC). This is a very common source of nasty postscript.
If you see from the logs (using lpq -llll or lpq -L) that a job of yours is failing to print due to postscript errors then you will need to intervene at some stage in the postscript production process - printing to a file is often a good way to get hold of a postscript version of your print job. Probably the most useful tool to correct postscript is ps2ps (see below).
Useful commands to generate and fix postscript:
So, to reiterate, the majority of printing errors are caused by postscript problems and ps2ps is a wonderful utility for fixing these problems.
Alternatively, you might find a postscript file which can't be fixed by the methods above, for which the last resort may be to roll up your sleeves and edit the postscript yourself. This isn't recommended for the faint-hearted, but read on for more info...
The trick with these files is to make sure that you remove all of the stuff that tries to set printer-specific things - if you don't you'll still get errors.
In postscript files that follow the DSC (Adobe's Document Structuring Convention) - typically ones with %% comments in them, generally) printer specific features will be enclosed in something like
%%BeginPaperSize
<rubbish here>
%%EndPaperSize
If you remove everything between these two comments then the file will print. If you get PS files that won't print, the section of the file that's probably causing the problems is the Setup section (%%BeginSetup -> %%EndSetup) - removing features from this bit will probably fix it.
Instructions for printing to an EUCS Printer can be found here.
Advice on getting the best out of the HP2500CP A0 printer using xfig and LaTeX can be found here
If you have to print a file with hundreds of pages, to a busy printer, try to split the file up into bite-sized chunks, then print each chunk at a low priority. That way, other peoples' smaller documents can still be printed as your gargantuan book slowly takes physical form.
Print at a lower than normal priority like this: lpr -CC
Split a file into chunks like this:
acroread - just
bring up the Print... dialog box as normal and print ten or
twenty pages at a time using the Print Range section. Remember
to use lpr -CC.
[vammala]toby: lpr ~/tmp/testpage.ps Status Information, attempt 1 of 3: sending job 'toby@vammala+270' to bp3@printbp.inf.ed.ac.uk connecting to 'printbp.inf.ed.ac.uk', attempt 1 connected to 'printbp.inf.ed.ac.uk' Send_auth_transfer: on client krb5_cc_get_principal failed - No credentials cache found job 'toby@vammala+270' transfer to bp3@printbp.inf.ed.ac.uk failed on client krb5_cc_get_principal failed - No credentials cache found Waiting 10 seconds before retry
... or when you then look at the printer queue with lpq there's a message about "No credentials cache found". The output looks something like this:
[locke]toby: lpq Printer 'bp3@printbp.inf.ed.ac.uk' - on client krb5_cc_get_principal failed - No credentials cache found [locke]toby:The problem here is that your Kerberos ticket has expired. The Kerberos section tells you how to fix this.
lpr.cups -o media=a3 -Pprintername document
From elsewhere, use ssh to login to either staff.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk or student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk. You can get ssh from openssh.org. Windows users may like WinSCP or PuTTY.
staff.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk , ssh2.inf.ed.ac.uk and student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk should only be used as gateways into Informatics; as soon as you're logged in to either machine you should then login to another machine right away:
From home, it may be possible to run applications - it depends on your setup. if you're running Unix then connect to your server as above using ssh -X and run the application.
If you are using Windows then you will have to have an X-server such as Cygwin/XFree or Exceed running.
ResNet has been configured to allow no inbound connections, a policy which is decided centrally and which we do not control. As a result, the X clients running on DICE machines are not able to connect to the X server running on your ResNet machine.
The University has a dialup service which is free to students and staff. Alternatively you can use one of the many commercial ISPs and follow their instructions on how to connect to the Internet.
If you want files back from before last night's backup, we may be able to restore them from a tape backup for you. In this case, contact support and tell us, as accurately as you can:
Please try to backup important data and other items yourself in the first instance so you do not need to rely on us. We cannot always guarantee full restoration of what you have lost.
SICStus Prolog is free to students of Informatics. If that's you, contact Support to get a copy. You'll be asked to sign a form declaring that the software is for your own personal use and that you won't give other people the software or the instructions on how to obtain it.
The first simple thing to look for is usually a lock file. Some programs, for example netscape, have them to prevent you from running more than one session of the program at a time. If you have one of these programs executed in your startup and it doesn't come back up after having exited a previous session (possibly by a crash), the lock file may still be lurking and will prevent the program from coming up again. For Netscape, lock files are in the .netscape directory; for other programs you will find them in a similar area.
However, your software problem may turn out to be more complex than this. There's a wide range of Linux software. If you are having trouble and you cannot solve your problem with the on-line help and documentation that is available, contact support.
Type man man on the command line to find out more about man. Search for relevant man pages using whatis and apropos.
Info can be
accessed with the command info, or from inside XEmacs
click the Info button or type M-x info.
Once there, read the beginner's tutorial to learn how to use the
system (it's not hard).
(setq options-save-faces 't)
We found the answer for this in the world wide web version of the XEmacs FAQ at http://www.xemacs.org - it's well worth looking there for answers to XEmacs questions.
XEmacs does this with iso-accents-mode. Type
`M-x iso-accents-mode' and then type in the key for
the accent followed by the letter. This will produce the accented
letter. For example, type a double-quotes character " followed
by u to get ü.
pdflatex. To
produce PDF from DVI files use dvips -Ppdf followed
by ps2pdf. Use ps2pdf to convert Postscript
to PDF (but do check afterwards that it doesn't look blurred and horrible). See also Submission of PDF Papers.
acroread or xpdf or gv.
Broken PDF (see next question) sometimes displays well in one of these
programs but not the others, so if you have difficulty then try
all three.
pdf2ps broken.pdf broken.ps
ps2ps broken.ps fixed.ps
/tmp.
This may be the fault of KDE. Change your KDE preferences - find and uncheck the "Apply fonts and colours to non-KDE apps" box. Then reload KDE or logout and login again. This is also covered in the local and remote copies of the KDE FAQ.
Use gv. Read the manual with man gv.
Use gv. It automatically handles .ps.gz documents -
there's no need for you to "gunzip" the file beforehand. Read the
manual with man gv.
openssl des can be used to encrypt (-e)
or decrypt (-d) files. Note that it isn't completely
compatible with the "des" command on the old dcs.ed.ac.uk Linux
machines: if you have files encrypted with "des" then decrypt them in
the same environment before encrypting them again on a dice machine.
Alternatively you can use gpg if you have a gpg key set
up.
If you need to run software that takes not seconds but hours, days or weeks to complete, and makes a normal machine run horribly slowly, then you need to use the compute servers.
There are two compute servers. Use the "ssh" command to login to them. One compute server is for MSc and undergraduate students, and is called student.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk. The other compute server is for staff and research postgraduate students and is called staff.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk.
Both machines are Dell Poweredge 1750s with 4GB of memory and dual Intel Xeon 2.8GHz processors. (Each processor has hyperthreading, which allows a single physical processor to have multiple contexts and appear as multiple CPUs; so for example the "top" command shows four processors.)
Yes, please do. All big processes on student.compute and staff.compute should be run with "nice". This decreases their priority a little, giving a better response on the command line. To use nice just put the word nice in front of your command.
The normal way of getting emacs to use a different language doesn't work any more, because the spelling checker it uses, ispell, nowadays just calls a different program called aspell, which seems to ignore some of the ispell settings. To get emacs to use a different language's dictionary, for example American English, type this command in a shell window:
export ASPELL_CONF='master american'
... then start emacs& from that shell. You can find out what language dictionaries are available by looking in the aspell dictionary directory, like this:
ls /usr/lib/aspell
This is usually a problem with the accelerated graphics driver hardware and can be intermittent or repeatable. To fix try executing the following command in the matlab shell before running your code:
opengl software
This switches to the software driver instead. Note that it will make rendering of complex graphics slower.
Try this command to unmute the sound:
alsaunmute 0
(See the staff mail page first.)
All members of staff of the University have accounts created for them automatically. These users may get their account details (your universal username and initial password) from you local Support Office.
There are several possibilities. One is that there is a network problem (the mail server is down, there has been a large influx of messages); in that case it will be fixed as soon as possible.
Another possibility is that you have set up mail forwarding but made a mistake. If your mail filtering is not working properly you may lose mail, messages may be partially delivered and then retried, and the postmaster's mailbox may be filled with error messages. Have a look around the documentation to see if you can sort out your error on your own; otherwise contact Support.
We encourage you to use one of these mailers: IMP (i.e. the web interface), pine, mozilla and netscape. Other mailers may also be made to work after a fashion. See the Informatics mail service instructions.
It is possible to filter out email which is suspected to be spam. But not all spam can be filtered out and some genuine messages may be incorrectly identified as spam.
See the general search page to find a student by name. See also the answer to the next question below.
Staff can also browse for Informatics students by class and module using the ITO database pages.
The use of S-Plus has been discontinued under Dice. In consultation with Steve Renals (head of computing), it was decided that using R (an equivalent free stats package) is more straightforward and cost effective. In contrast to S-Plus, R doesn't come with a graphical user interface, but we are currently investigating alternative GUI solutions (such as R Commander).
David Reitter has put together a set of introductory materials on R.
In addition to R, SPSS for Windows is also available for statistical computation. It's installed on the public PC in the HCRC photocopier room, and on the two PCs in the Cognitive Systems Lab (basement of 6BP). The lab can be booked online and keys for the lab are on loan from the HCRC General Office.
<<<<<<< index.html To request a list, contact support via the web form ,
http://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/list-name
The list-owner will then add or remove your from the list at their own discretion.
======= Finally, for simple statistical analysis, PipeStat is also available under Dice. For details please see: http://www.acm.org/~perlman/stat/ >>>>>>> 1.377
(See the student mail page first.)
Go to www.sms.ed.ac.uk or use pine - see below for configuration advice.
The document: Configuring Pine to Use the University Email System explains how to configure pine to work with the SMS service. An extensive pine manual is available.
See the general search page to find a student by name.
See also the answer to the next question below.
Staff can browse for students by class and module using the ITO database pages
The top level document describing our LaTeX installation is here.
The perpetua font is a licenced font but the University does not have a site licence for it. We do have copies of the University crest (the lettering of which is in perpetua font) and these are free for us to use for production of documents for printing and viewing but we are not licensed to use the perpetua font for anything other than the crest.
Fortunately, this is easy to fix. Just quit netscape, then move the old configuration files aside, and start netscape again. It automatically makes a new, clean set of configuration files.
mv ~/.netscape ~/.old-netscape
netscape &
If this has sorted the problem, then you will probably next want to rescue your collection of bookmarks. To do this, quit netscape then copy the bookmarks file over from the old netscape directory to the new one, like this:
cp ~/.old-netscape/bookmarks.html ~/.netscape
You might also want to rescue your cookies file in the same way.
Content-type header. perldoc CGI may
help.
Some of this is recapped and expanded on the homepages docs.
If your script still produces this error, and you're sure that none of the above suggestions is relevant, then tell support the location of the CGI script and a description of how to run it. They'll then look up the web server's error log for you; this can give a more detailed error message which you can then look up in the Apache FAQ or manual.
If you want to restrict access to University of Edinburgh machines only you would create a .htaccess file in the top directory of the tree you wanted to protect, and in it you would put
deny from all allow from 129.215.0.0/16
See the general web FAQ for a bit more detail.
Students should not be running their own web servers to provide a service external to the School. Any servers found doing so will be stopped and their owner contacted.
The Apache docs are installed in /usr/share/doc. Once you've digested them and created your own httpd.conf file, then all you need to do is point Apache at it with the command:
/usr/sbin/httpd -f /path/to/my/httpd.confRemember that the httpd will be running as one of your processes, so it will not be able to write to system areas such as /var/ to create lock and log files. You should specify alternative locations for these files with the various httpd.conf configuration directives. Also, any weaknesses that you introduce (due to a poorly configured server) may mean that anyone connecting to your server could gain access to your file area that you did not intend.
Note: only staff can do this.
The Informatics web site is for official School of Informatics material. If you are a member of staff and you want to publish a page, read the introduction and the publishing instructions.
All Informatics users are able to publish personal pages on the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk web server. The Homepages publishing guide tells you how to do it.
On the Informatics teaching web pages NOT your home pages. See this page for why, and this FAQ entry for how.
Cosign is a single sign-on (SSO) web login technology developed at the University of Michigan. It uses a centralised sign-on mechanism to authenticate users (for Informatics users, this means authenticating with your Kerberos principal). It uses login and service cookies to manage the authorization for a cosign-protected web site. More information on how Cosign works can be found on the Cosign web site.
Informatics will be modifying all sites which are currently protected using kx509 and the authportal so that they use Cosign.
When you visit a web-site that's Cosign protected, you will be redirected to https://weblogin.inf.ed.ac.uk so you can be authenticated. If you're using Firefox on a DICE machine, authentication will happen automatically (using your existing Kerberos credentials) and you will then be returned to the Cosign-protected site. For other web browsers and operating systems, you will be prompted for a username and password to authenticate you (and then returned to the originating Cosign-protected site on successful authentication).
Cosign should work from all web browsers, providing javascript is enabled. Please let us know if it doesn't work for you.
We recommend for casual/occasional viewing/printing of Microsoft Office documents (such as Word, Excel or Powerpoint email attachments) using OpenOffice, or once available Crossover Plugin. See Using Microsoft Windows Applications/Documents on DICE for further information.
We recommend that for creating and sharing Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel or Powerpoint) if at all possible OpenOffice is used instead as the native format. Where that is not feasible and once available Crossover Office can be used for which a licence must be purchased. See Using Microsoft Windows Applications/Documents on DICE for further information.
We recommend that for running Windows applications under DICE you use a program called Crossover Office for which a licence must be purchased. See Using Microsoft Windows Applications/Documents on DICE for further information.
Computing Services Virus Protection information
We are able to offer a number of facilities such as shared file space, group we space, CVS repositories and email lists to certain groups of users who wish to share resources.
Such facilities include:
Please contact support for more information.
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Tel: +44 131 650 2690, Fax: +44 131 651 1426, E-mail: hod@inf.ed.ac.uk Please contact our webadmin with any comments or corrections. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all material is copyright © The University of Edinburgh |
