Introduction to Solar Computing

Updated 2005.04.06

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 primary system in the cluster is Mithra. It hosts /home exported to all systems. This machine provides central authentication for users by means of a NIS clustering scheme. Your username and password is the same on all systems.

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. We would like to keep /home allocations to under 700 MBytes. This is to aid with backups. The data disk (/disk/data/username) are not currently quotaed.

Printing Services

See "How to use printers".

Mail to and from the Solar Machines

Mithra has been configured as the Mailhub for all the solar machines. Mail aimed at any of the solar machines is delivered to Mithra. All outgoing mail is relayed via Mithra. your mail address while using the solar physics machines will be username@solar.physics.montana.edu.

Solargroup Web pages

The Solar Group web server is accessed at http://solar.physics.montana.edu. They live on the disk /www. You should have a web directory on this disk, if you don't please see Keiji. Your web files can be accessed using a URL of the form http://solar.physics.montana.edu/~user or http://solar.physics.montana.edu/user.

Anonymous FTP

An anonymous FTP server runs on Mithra. User directories are located on /home/ftp/pub/user. Please contact Keiji, if you require anonymous ftp directories.

Backups

/home and the mail spool are backed up weekly, while /www and /disk/data monthly. Users wishing to access backups of their directories should contact Keiji. A duplicate of /home is made every night and is available to recover accidentally deleted files etc.

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. It is highly recommended to renew your password at least once a year. 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. 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 currently on mithra. Ssh provides encrypted connections. From outside of MSU you must use ssh when making connections to solar machines.
If you have any comments or questions, please contact www@solar.physics.montana.edu