|
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 Supports record of the ticket, including all information about what's been done so far, directly in RT on the web. Provided that the initial request has been made using a DICE authenticated username, from a DICE machine simply go to this URL https://rt3.inf.ed.ac.uk
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.
New Staff.
Informatics HR will take the details from you and perform the administrative magic. Staff and visitors are given a unique username by IS and this has to be in the database before an account can be created. Account details can be collected from your local Support Office unless other arrangements have been made.
Visitors.
Visitor accounts are dealt with by your local admin office. Students from other institutions who are not going to matriculate should contact their local Admin Office and are considered as visitors.
Students
Any Informatics undergrad/msc/phd students should go to the Informatics Student Services in Appleton Tower room 4.02 to request an account.
Academic staff requiring accounts for students of this university but not Informatics, should also speak to Student Services.
Students from other institutions who are going to matriculate should also be processed by Student Services.
This is to facilitate ongoing academic collaborations and the request should come from the member of staff who is willing to act as host.
In order to keep your account active there are a few changes that have to be made. These are administrative and are done by your local admin person.
Both the entries in the VRS and the School Database should match and should be kept current for as long as the account is required. You will no longer have an account on Staffmail. This is withdrawn 30 days after the end of your contract.
| ~/.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.
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. Please note to run jobs longer than 18 hours you need to be registered to use krenew.
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 R610s with 48GB of memory and 2.66GHz processors.
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.
Local information about the Beowulf computing clusters is in the Beowulf section of the systems pages.
Local information about using Hadoop is on the Hadoop wikipages.
Edinburgh Compute and Data Facilities homepage
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:
From Sept 2009 all undergrad and MSc students will have 1G of disk space:
| Course | Soft limit (Kb) | Hard limit (Kb) |
| first year undergrad | 1G | 1.1G |
| second year undergrad | 1G | 1.1G |
| third year undergrad | 1G | 1.1G |
| fourth year undergrad | 1G | 1.1G |
| MSc | 1G | 1.1G |
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.
When your are finished, logout and return to your window manager login by typing "Ctrl, Alt and F7".
First of all, right-click on your Desktop wastebasket and empty it. You may also have to purge the hidden Trash directory. Bring up a shell window, the command to get rid of the Trash is
rm -rf .Trash Please be VERY sure that you specify the actual name of the directory after the -rf as it is possible to delete too much!
Your mozilla, opera or chrome cache directories can grow large. To empty mozilla cache; start Firefox, from its Tools menu choose Clear Recent History; Time Range to Clear, choose All; Expand the options under Details, tick all the boxes and click the Clear Now button.
A useful command to see your disk usage is du, type man du for the options available. The most useful command to show how much disk space your hidden dotfiles are using is
du -sh .[a-z]* |sort -n
To see the same list of files sorted strictly in order of size, type
du -s .[a-z]* |sort -n
To see the size of each and every file in your home directory type
du -h | more and press return or space bar to scroll down, 'q' to quit.
You can ignore everything under ~/Yesterday as this does not count towards your quota - this directory is a backup where you can retrieve a file from the day before if you find you have accidentally deleted something.
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.
Remember you can keep an eye on how much of your quota you have used with the fs lq -human command.
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 |
All mail is handled by the University's mail service. Any problems should be directed to IS.Helpline@ed.ac.uk
There are two mail directories provided by Information Services. One is for staff and one is for students.
A list of all mailing lists is available at lists.inf.ed.ac.uk. It is possible to tell which lists are generated from the database and those which are created by support.
Mailing Lists are usually only set up at the request of staff and postgraduate students. However, undergraduates may request a mailing list to be set up if the request has the support of a member of academic staff.
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.
http://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/options/list-name
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.
Most DICE machines sleep automatically. Most of the machines in our student labs are configured to do this, and office desktops running SL6 or newer should also sleep. Click here to find out more about sleep on DICE machines.
Your machine may well be sleeping. If it is, pressing a key on the keyboard should wake it up. You may have to wait a few seconds before the machine is back to normal. Click here to find out more about sleep on DICE machines.
Switching off the monitor doesn't break anything, but can confuse other users of the machine!
Just logout. The machine and the monitor will then fall asleep as soon as it is safe to do so. Some of our machines automatically sleep to save power - see the sleep page to find out more.
The "homedir" command tells you where your files are kept. For instance:
[vallejo]joxley: homedir
joxley (Jennifer Oxley) : minotaur/vicepb : /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/user/j/joxley : free 241.2G (used 47%)
Don't be mislead by the apparently large amount of free space. This is not your personal quota, it reports the current usage of that volume on disc shared by many users. To see which file server your shared group space is on, use the 'fs whereis' command. eg:
[vallejo]joxley: fs whereis /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/group/teaching/sdp
File /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/group/teaching/sdp is on host cameleopard.inf.ed.ac.uk
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 eighteen 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 eighteen 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.
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.)
You will find a guide to setting up kerberos on a number of platforms here.
If you're a member of staff or a research postgrad student, you are able to connect your laptop to a network port in your office. Please contact Support stating the room and network port number if you are unable to obtain an IP address as the port may not already be set to DHCP.
Please never just unplug a computer from the network and plug in your laptop in its place.
Informatics uses the University's wireless network. See the wireless network pages for more information about the network.
Before you can use this service you must be registered with EASE. This is done by filling in the form EASE registration form.
An initial password is required to register with EASE. If staff or visitors do not know this password, they should go to the nearest Support Office who can supply it. Students should go to the IS Helpdesk in the Main Library at George Square. It is NOT your dice password.
Then follow the instructions for wireless registration.
The secure wireless network, eduroam (EDUcation ROAMing) can be used by visitors to the University of Edinburgh to gain access to the Internet using the same username and password as they use at their home institution.
Likewise, UoE people can login to this network when visiting other member institutions.
Any member of staff can generate a guest wireless account for their short-term visitor.
For larger numbers of visitor wireless accounts, e.g. for conferences/workshops the organiser should contact Information Services via ltsts@ed.ac.uk.
The wireless service is run by IS and problems should be reported to them by mailing IS.Helpdesk@ed.ac.uk.
These can be booked via MyEd, or from the Information Services Laptop Clinics webpage.
Remote Access: see How do I access my account from outside Informatics?
The Informatics Computer Labs are located in Appleton Tower and are open all the time by swipe card access.
Permitted punctuation characters are: ! " $ % ^ & * ( ) ~ @ : } { [ ] ? > < / . , \ |
DO NOT TELL YOUR PASSWORD TO ANYONE
Passwords must adhere to this password policy.
If you forget your DICE password please visit Computing Support in IF-2.07 or AT-4.11 with your matric card or other form of picture identification, or ask the ISS to request us to send a new password to them. 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? above.)
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
In some of these cases you will probably need to have member of the support team to assist you to get back into your account. For this follow the procedure noted in Forgotten Passwords above.
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 directory 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.
Use the switchdesk command to set your chosen desktop as default. For example:
switchdesk gnome
September 2010 This no longer is in service.
There is some documentation for academic staff, tutors and demonstrators (anyone doing marking) on using the School's electronic practical submissions system.
The charging system is that run by the University. Full documentation is available describing the charges and how to top up your account once your quota is used up.
Print Credit for 2012/2013
| Course | Semester 1 | Semester 2 |
| first year undergrad | £2.50 | £2.50 |
| second year undergrad | £2.50 | £2.50 |
| third year undergrad | £2.50 | £2.50 |
| fourth year undergrad | £3.75 | £12.50 |
| fifth year undergrad | £3.75 | £10 |
| MSc | £5 | £5 |
lpstat -p will show you all the available printers.
printer at1 is idle. enabled since Fri 09 Jan 2009 03:15:31 GMT
printer at10c is idle. enabled since Mon 12 Jan 2009 10:45:09 GMT
printer at11 is idle. enabled since Mon 12 Jan 2009 10:45:10 GMT
printer at13c now printing at13c-0. enabled since Mon 12 Jan 2009 10:45:10 GMT
printer at14 is idle. enabled since Mon 12 Jan 2009 10:45:11 GMT
printer at17 now printing at17-0. enabled since Mon 12 Jan 2009 10:45:11 GMT
lpstat -l -p printername shows various information, including location and the model of a specific printer.
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.
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 converter 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.
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: lpqThe problem here is that your Kerberos ticket has expired. The Kerberos section tells you how to fix this.
Printer 'bp3@printbp.inf.ed.ac.uk' -
on client krb5_cc_get_principal failed - No credentials cache found
[locke]toby:
enscript -b "my header text goes here" document
Will print document with a header of your choice (enclosed by quotes if a string containing spaces).lpr.cups -o media=a3 -Pprintername document
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.
Please note that these machines should only be used as gateways into Informatics; as soon as you're logged into the gateway 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.
The residential network 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 KeyCom machine.
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.
Webots is a Robotics simulator used in the School. A free trial / demo is freely downloadable from the Cyberbotics website, instructions are here
The first simple thing to look for is usually a lock file. Some programs, for example firefox, 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 firefox, lock files are in the .mozilla/firefox/your_profile 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.
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-0.60/
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.
The Skype licence prohibits us from installing this software on your machine for you, or distributing it DICE system-wide, it only authorises an individual download and install. You can download Skype for Linux and extract it to either your home directory or /disk/scratch/ on your machine if you are staff or postgrad, then install it yourself.
Upgrading software to the latest version across DICE can often be problematic, since it requires us to check that upgrading a package (and all of its dependencies) will not alter any current teaching and research requirements, or require large changes to core packages which could cause compatibility or stability problems. For this reason it is not always possible, even if the version on DICE is much older than the latest release.
However, in some cases where it is possible to update a popular package but not roll it out, we can make a package available for selected machines on request. Where this has already been done the Research and Teaching Unit maintain a list of packages along with their expected date of inclusion: please see Optional Research and Teaching packages for more details.
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.
SPSS is available on the Windows PCs and Mac's in the Open-Access labs (e.g. George Square Main Library)
Finally, for simple statistical analysis, PipeStat is also available under Dice. For details please see: http://www.acm.org/~perlman/stat/
(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
Such facilities include:
Please contact support for more information.
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.
Coltex is a system allowing multiple people to share and edit a common LaTeX document. It has a backend repository to control and manage the document files and an automated build mechanism to keep a PDF snapshot version of the document up to date.
Fortunately, this is easy to fix. Just quit firefox, then move the old configuration files aside, and start firefox again. It automatically makes a new, clean set of configuration files.
mv ~/.mozilla ~/.old-mozilla
firefox &
If this has sorted the problem, then you will probably next want to rescue your collection of bookmarks. To do this, from the firefox toolbar, select Bookmarks - Organise Bookmarks - Import and Backup - Restore - Choose File -then browse to your old mozilla/firefox directory. You'll see your profile something.default which is a random set of numbers and letters. In the profile directory you will see the file to import called bookmarks.html
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 the publishing guide 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.
Many web sites in Informatics use Cosign authentication for protected or restricted-access pages.
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.
Browser (and other) advice is available from the University's Euclid FAQ here.
We recommend for casual/occasional viewing/printing of Microsoft Office documents (such as Word, Excel or Powerpoint email attachments) using OpenOffice.
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.
There are a few WindowsXP machines in the hotdesk areas of the Forum. Undergraduates can use the machines in the cafe area in Appleton Tower. If you regularly need to use Microsoft Windows then you may wish to install a virtual machine on your DICE desktop.
See VirtualBox for further information.
Information Services Anti-Virus software
As a member of The School of Informatics you may be eligible for free Microsoft products, such as Windows7 via the
To register, so you can login and download software, send your full name (and matric number if you are a student) to dreamspark@inf.ed.ac.uk
For software not covered under this agreement, an appropriate licence must be purchased. Please fill in the computing support form providing details of the research grant/ budget that this should be charged to.
|
Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, Scotland, UK
Tel: +44 131 651 5661, Fax: +44 131 651 1426, E-mail: school-office@inf.ed.ac.uk Please contact our webadmin with any comments or corrections. Logging and Cookies Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all material is copyright © The University of Edinburgh |
