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Unix services and support at Pomona|June 2004
This document is available in PDF and HTML from
http://www.dci.pomona.edu/docs. |
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Unix services and support at Pomona|June 2004
This document is available in PDF and HTML from
http://www.dci.pomona.edu/docs. |
Pomona has one full time staff member, myself, and a small number of student assistants dedicated to the support and service of Unix systems on campus. There are about ten Sun SPARC workstations, twenty SGI workstations, and twenty Linux workstations spread amongst the natural sciences departments. For more information on these systems, or to request an account, please see the DCI web site at http://www.dci.pomona.edu.
We provide a few freely available operating systems, such as Debian GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, on CD media for easy installation. To the extent it is possible, we will help with installation and use of any of these operating systems on your Pomona-owned or personal computers. We recommend Debian GNU/Linux, unless you want to purchase commercial support from Red Hat or SuSE, and the GNOME 2 desktop which is installed on the campus Linux and Solaris systems.
We also encourage people that are curious about open source, but not yet ready to change operating systems, to try a few of the more stable and mature packages that are available for Windows. Examples are OpenOffice, GAIM, Mozilla Firefox, and the Gimp. We can provide installation media for these packages as well.
I have prepared short (45-60 minute) presentations designed to introduce beginners to open source software, Unix or TEX, which I am happy to give on short notice to any group that wishes to listen. With more preparation time (about one week), we can present seminars other topics such as may be appropriate to a specific class or working group.
More generally, I, and some of the people I work with, believe strongly in the value of community owned, open source software such as Linux and GNU. We will be happy to help you investigate free alternatives to commercial software whereever possible.
Basic access to all our shared Unix systems is granted with shell accounts. A shell account allows you to log in remotely through ssh, or at the graphical desktop of some systems. At the time the account is created, a new user may choose between sh, csh, tcsh, and bash as login shells. We support the GNOME 2 desktop on Linux and Solaris systems, and the the standard IRIX (4d) desktop on SGI systems.
We have a distributed account system that enables us to store your account in a centralized directory and make it available on all the campus Unix servers at once, modulo one or two bugs.
Many readers will know that Unix systems provide a very comfortable programming environment, and to that end several languages are maintained and available for software development. I may be able to help with projects written in one of the languages that I know and use:
There are other languages that we provide compilers for, but may be difficult to find help with, since I do not know them:
The legendary TEX and LATEX typesetting systems, common in mathematical and scientific publishing, are fully supported and hosted from savah. The TEX-Live distribution is NFS-exported and believed to work on many platforms, including Linux and Solaris. More information is available on the DCI web site.
An ITS-housed Linux system named listserv offers the popular majordomo mailing list manager. With majordomo, moderated and unmoderated email lists can be easily managed, and most administrative tasks, such as adding and removing subscribers, can be done without human intervention. Using majordomo also allows other handy tricks such as inserting the list name into the subject, or appending a footer with instructions for how to unsubscribe.
There is a Web interface to the majordomo program available at http://listserv.pomona.edu/cgi-bin/majordomo. From this URL it is possible to browse the available mailing lists and subscribe or unsubscribe yourself. If you would like to create a mailing list, please contact me or Brett Watts at ITS for help.
I run a consolidated Apache web server, which you can see at http://www.dci.pomona.edu, that may be used by students or faculty in any department. It allows several popular server-side scripting languages such as Perl and PHP. More details are contained in the “FAQ” on the DCI web site.
The email service provided on the DCI is different from the standard Microsoft Exchange account provided by ITS in several important ways. Our messages are delivered through procmail, which enables selective filtering, processing, and forwarding far surpassing the capabilities of Microsoft Outlook. In addition, all email is passed through a “sanitizer” and virus scanner, which reduces the risk of virus infection and abuse of mail clients. However, the sanitizer may make it more difficult to send and receive dangerous email attachments such as Word documents.
DCI mail can be accessed through secure IMAP, from the shell with pine or mutt, or at http://webmail.dci.pomona.edu. Anyone with a DCI account has a functioning email address of the form username@dci.pomona.edu. More questions about DCI email are answered in the FAQ.
A variety of scientific and technical applications are licensed by the academic departments. A few examples are IRAF in astronomy, Fluent in physics, and Gaussian and SYBYL in chemistry and biology. The faculty in these departments are the best source of information about these applications.