Notes for How-to-Compute Talk

These are notes in progress for the "How to Compute Like a Grad Student" talk I'll be giving on Monday, August 26, as part of the 1996 CSD Immigration Course. They will be polished up and made available as a reference after the talk.

Note: I only have 45 minutes to talk, so obviously I won't be covering most of the material below in depth. (Much of the text below probably won't even appear on a slide.) I'll try to focus on cultural issues and other things that are important enough that everyone should hear them. For detailed set-up help and so forth, folks can see the web version, which will resemble what's below.

Comments are welcome!

Related resources

• David Eckhardt's slides from the 1995 talk
• David Rochberg's Helpful Tidbits about CMU SCS
• Clauss Strauch's slides for the 1996 Facilities intro talk (given the week after this talk)
• Facilities intro docs

Crucial points

• Ask questions. (Neat thing about CMU is there are plenty of knowledgable and helpful people around. Take advantage of that whenever you can, and be helpful yourself.)
• Do good works for the community.
• Take care of your body.
• Be a Reasonable Person.

How to Compute Like a Grad Student

Intro

• Quick overview.
• Not much time today, so see the expanded version of this talk on the web!
• Clauss Strauch will give the official facilities intro talk next Wednesday.

Taking care of your body

• plug for Maria's RSI talk later in the IC
• Facilities info
• Rule #1: Take action at the first sign of pain.
• Rule #0: Take action before the first sign of pain.

How to find answers or report problems

• Facilities documentation
• your officemates
• zephyr
• post to newsgroups (cmu.cs.unix.forum, ...)
• mail to help@cs
• call the operator (x8-2607)

SCS Facilities

What's unusual at CMU SCS

• a fair amount of in-house or uncommon stuff (decreasing somewhat):
  • AFS
  • Kerberos
  • depot
  • sup
  • MMDF
  • cboards
• good facilities support: relatively uniform environment, backups, etc.
• good volunteer support

Make yourself at home (today!)

• Create an /afs/cs/user/<you>/.plan file. Make all your non-AFS ~/.plan files symlinks to this one. Should probably contain
  • Position (Graduate Student), Project Affiliation
  • Addresses, Phone Numbers
  • Pointers to directions, maps...
  • Schedules (weekly, travel)
  • Latitude, Longitude
  • A short quote/joke/...
• Edit your csd entry (only readable by CS people) with

  setenv EDITOR emacs
  csd -e
  

• Update your office's door label (see instructions)
• Create a web home page (see instructions)
• Andrew account
  • if you don't know your andrew userid:

    finger FirstName.LastName@andrew.cmu.edu
    

  • telnet far-unix.andrew.cmu.edu
    • password is first 8 digits of your Social Security Number (or Student ID)
  • forward mail to your cs.cmu.edu address:

    wpi
    

  • symlink to your CS .plan:

    ln -s /afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/<your_cs_userid>/.plan ~/.plan
    

  • then forget about it until you TA
• CMU.EDU name
  • make sure you have kerberos tickets, then

    telnet cmu.edu
    

    and set a CMU.EDU name for yourself. Choose carefully--you can't change it. Once it takes effect you can receive email as cmuname@cmu.edu. First.Last@cmu.edu should also work.

Communicating with SCS people

• Finding people:
  • phone program (also includes many CMU offices, local restaurants, etc.)
  • csd
  • finger first.last@cmu.edu
  • home page index
  • Digital Face Board (spiffy)
• zephyr
  • messages with (sort of) instantaneous delivery, personal or broadcast
  • how to set up:
    • emacs zephyr-mode (see the sample zephyr setup in particular)
    • zwgc (Zephyr WindowGram Client, naturally)
  • Zephyr Archives
  • instances
  • CS broadcast zephyr culture
    • "virtual terminal room"
    • how to ask questions
    • tradition of whinging
    • when not to take things seriously
    • whom to ignore? :-)
    • don't sign
    • ...
• netnews
  • newsgroups to read
  • newsreaders: trn, xrn, strn, gnus, netscape
  • how to post news
• e-mail (see below)
• telephone
  • Type "phone help"
• drop by their office
• mailing lists: cs-students, cs-newstu, cs-faculty, cs-support
  • extremely low volume. consider newsgroup post instead.
  • watch your replies!
  • when sending to lists, consider doing

    To: yourself@cs.cmu.edu
    Bcc: listname@cs.cmu.edu
    

    to prevent accidental reply-to-all.
• Scheduling
  • cboards
  • ical (not many shared calendars yet, but some cboard integration)

mail handling

• Name resolution (shared by finger, mail):
  • Darrell_Kindred@cs.cmu.edu
  • Darrell.Kindred@cs.cmu.edu
  • kindred@cs.cmu.edu
  • doorbell.cowride@cs.cmu.edu (bounces, but suggests me as nearest match)
  • dkindred@cs.cmu.edu (could become ambiguous if Melvin Dkindred joins the department)
  • dkindred+@cs.cmu.edu (guaranteed unambiguous)
  • Darrell_Kindred@cmu.edu
  • dkindred@cmu.edu (guaranteed unambiguous)
• MMDF, .maildelivery (include samples)
  • one AFS gotcha: make sure home dir and ~/.maildelivery are don't have world-writable mode bits or .maildelivery will be ignored. (Do chmod o-w ~ ~/.maildelivery to be sure.) (The mmdf mail dispatcher doesn't know that it's "really" safe because of AFS perms.)
• zephyr notification of new mail (zrcvalert)
• user+foo@cs.cmu.edu -- handy for auto-filing
• kpop, pop (explain some typical setups)
• mail delivery to "GP" machine (e.g. ux1.sp) vs. workstation
• mail readers:
  • VM (xemacs or emacs)
  • MH (cmd line, mh-e w/ xemacs/emacs, exmh, xmh)
  • GNUS (xemacs) -- (need setup instructions)
  • Netscape
  • UCB mail -- but can't do kpop/pop3, can't read MMDF format
  • elm
  • Mac/Windows: Eudora, Netscape, etc.

Your workstation

• getting root access (mail help@cs--don't expect much sympathy if you screw things up; don't make gratuitous configuration changes)
• X setup (fvwm, xkeycaps, ...?)
• to xlock or not to xlock?
• accounts for officemates
• if you don't like your tickets expiring, see

  /usr/local/bin/kauthd
  

setting up a home machine

• Do you want to?
• SCS dialup pools: 28.8kbps and 14.4kbps
• SLIP/PPP
• Linux
  • Suggested distribution: Red Hat Linux (version 3.0.3 available at /afs/cs/i386_linux1/dist, or borrow the CD from me).
  • Get local software (kerberos, zephyr, dialup scripts) from NFS repository:

    mkdir /cobra
    mount -t nfs cobra.mach.cs.cmu.edu:/linux /cobra -o soft,intr,ro
    ls /cobra/local
    

  • Ask on zephyr for further assistance.
• Macs: see facilities docs for off-campus Macs
• Windows 3.1/95/NT: see facilities docs, including eXpress X server
• Campers: keep an eye on modem pool usage
• rpp-dial

Useful local resources

• CMU library catalog
• LIS (library, library -v, lislook):
  • INSPEC
  • ...?
• finger coke@cs
• Harry Bovik's files
• LASER search engine for the CS Web (currently somewhat out of date)
• MOMspider (finds broken web links and other problems)
• Paul Heckbert's SCS acronym list

/usr/local collections (aka "misc collections")

• Software under /usr/local is partitioned into over 100 separate "collections".
• Some facilities-maintained, others volunteer-maintained (mostly by grad students).
• To name a few: emacs, xemacs, mosaic, purify, gnu-comp (gcc), gmake, java, sml, X11, allegro, library, less, kerberos, games, mathematica, zephyr, elm, patch, perl.
• See the software database.
• Problems? Mail to help@cs.
• Achieve fame and glory among your peers: pick up a collection in need of a maintainer, or create and maintain a new collection for your favorite tool.

the Reasonable Person Principle

• printing (covered by facilities)
• use of gp machines
• Terminal-room Software: There are public-access Mac and Windows machines around the department with licensed software (like photoshop) on them---it's not Reasonable to copy this software to your office machine---the software will detect multiple instances of itself running and the poor sod trying to use it in the terminal room will be screwed.
• modem use (cf home machine tips)
• network (ab)use: (moving machines, etc.)
• looking through other people's files
• in general, tread lightly on shared resources
• ?

Conclusion

• Ask questions!

Things to mention

Things to be worked into the outline above, in no particular order:

• AFS tips
  • OldFiles
  • watch out for permissions -- the mode bits are irrelevant for access ctl
    • e.g. ~/nsmail
  • suggested acl for home dir?
  • reliability (do you want your main home dir in AFS?)
  • tradeoffs in keeping stuff on local disk vs. AFS
  • increasing your workstation's AFS cache size
  • vicemon
  • You may want to have emacs auto-save to local disk.
• using office phones (see 'man phones' or use the 'phone' program, e.g., 'phone transfer')
• document editing & production
  • xemacs, emacs, framemaker, LaTeX, MS Word
• web stuff
  • making pages visible via www.cs.cmu.edu
  • MOMspider
  • available browsers and editors:
    • Netscape Navigator (netscape and netscape-beta)
    • Mosaic
    • Emacs-W3
    • lynx
• Read the Source, Luke.
  • finding source code for a /usr/local collection
  • basic structure of /usr/local collections
  • finding elusive man pages?
  • BSD source code: /afs/cs/archive/bsd/
  • Mach, OSF/1, AFS source code: ask help@cs for read access
• printing
  • how to print slides (for B&W, print to paper, then xerox to transparency. for color, print to one of the color slide printers.)