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)