Introduction to Solar Computing

Updated 2011.05.30

Welcome to the MSU Solar Physics Group. The following page details most of the information you will need to get started on the Solar Groups computers.

The gateway machines to our computers are "Mithra" and "Filament". They are accessible from anywhere in the world with SSH software. Mithra provides central authentication for users by means of a NIS clustering scheme. Your username and password is the same on all systems.
"Helios" is the dedicated server to the REU projects and one of the most powerful machines in our group. Hence it is recommended for REU students to use the machine.

System Support

Computing support is provided by Keiji Yoshimura. Keiji can be reached at x7848 at MSU. Feel free to call at any time should you need assistance.

User Disk Space Available

/home has user quotas set. The default quota on /home is 120 MBytes but more is available should you need it. The data disk (/disk/data/username) are not currently quotaed.

Printing Services

See "How to use printers".

Solargroup Web pages

The Solar Group web server is accessed at http://solar.physics.montana.edu. Your web files can be accessed using a URL of the form http://solar.physics.montana.edu/reu/2011/username/.

Change your password

You can change your password with the command "yppasswd" on Helios. Please take a look at the security guideline section below.

System Security

If your account is brand new, you will have been given a password to login with. Please change this password as soon as possible. You should use non-obvious passwords and they should be of minimum 8 characters, of mixed case and include non-alphanumeric characters. To help protect the systems here, we restrict accesses to the various services. For instance if you are outside of the local group of machines, you may only login to Mithra, Filament, and Helios. Attempting to connect to these and other services on other machines from outside of the solar group machines will result in failure. Ssh is installed on all servers. Ssh provides encrypted connections. From outside of MSU you must use ssh when making connections to solar machines.

Useful Links

Linux/Unix

Unix Tutorial for Beginners
Unix Basic Commands
More Linux Commands
Linux Commands Quick Reference (PDF)