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