Introduction to Facilities
About
SCS Computing Facilities staff provides most computing support services for the School of Computer Science. We are a completely separate organization from CMU Computing Services. You should contact us for any SCS computing-related problem or request.
The following documentation may be particularly helpful when getting started:
- The 2007 SCS Quick Reference Guide.
- The Introduction to Facilities slides for the 2006 Immigration Course talks give an overview of SCS Computing Facilities.
- Slides from David McWherter's How to Compute Like a Grad Student talk provide an overview of Facilities from a CS grad student's point of view (PowerPoint format).
- If you do not already have an SCS account, see our accounts & passwords documentation for information on how to apply for an account.
- This documentation frequently refers to different types of passwords (Kerboros passwords, instance passwords, etc). The password overview has information about what these passwords do and how to get & change them.
- One of the first things you should do is get your mail set up. See:
- You may wish to give yourself a web home page. See our step-by-step guide for having a home page at SCS for instructions on how to do this.
- If you will using Unix/Linux systems, you'll need to know something about AFS (at least enough to get around).
- You will most likely have a "Facilitized" machine of some sort on your desk. See our platform specific information for details on what sorts of software will be installed on this machine:
- If you are worried about whether or not your desktop machine is backed up, see our backup & restores documentation to see how to tell. Note that AFS home directories are automatically backed up.
- Our printing documentation has lists of SCS printers, indexed by location and type, along with instructions on how to print.
- If you need access to a scanner, CD writer, tape drive, Zip or Jaz drive, PC, Macintosh, or Sun, they are available to members of the SCS community at the Terminal Room in Wean 3501 (across from the elevators). Contact us if you need an account on the Sun in that room.
- Some sources of information about SCS and CMU computing:
- Our on-line documentation (which you are reading now) is searchable and contains answer to many common questions.
- CMU Computing Services (aka "Andrew") has extensive documentation (much of which is not applicable to SCS computing) at: http://www.cmu.edu/computing.
- Zephyr is a real-time chat system in use at SCS (and Andrew). The Frequently Zephyred Questions contains answers to many common SCS-specific questions, along with instructions on how to participate in Zephyr. There is also a Zephyr archive that is a searchable database of past messages.
- The newsgroup cmu.cs.scs contains important announcements (e.g. machine outages, etc) and should be required reading.