Computing Facilities

From McGill University Physics Department Technical Services Wiki

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Hardware

General purpose computers are located in Wong 0080, which is in the basement of the Wong Building.

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Software

Please visit the Software page for a partial list of what is available.

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Accounts

This section will move to Accounts.

Accounts are accessible via McGill ADS login. These accounts use your McGill Storage as home directory, and are effectively created on the fly. Since I don't have super user privliege over your account it is not possible for these accounts to have webpages. Take this up with ICS NCS or whomever is responsible for this sort of thing.

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Legacy Accounts

Accounts which existed prior to summer 2005 still exist and will continue to exist until they pry the keyboard from my cold dead hands. Interestingly Alan Greenberg said something quite similar to this in response to concerns from Unix system administrators regarding the confidentiality of e-mail sent at McGill. He got fired and now just about everyone is forced to use the Microsoft Exchange server (which deletes perfectly legitimate attachments because they have particular extensions and logs you out while editing your outgoing messages should you take too long.)

Legacy accounts will continue to support web-pages and email and other services. When I get time I will provided an interface for creating legacy accounts. The following machines support legacy accounts:

  • Ganesh this is the new server (full name: ganesh.ugrad.physics.mcgill.ca)
  • Odin this is the old server, please only use this machine if you can't do something on Ganesh and let me know about it so I can fix the problem.

You can use SSH and FTP to connect to Ganesh.

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Wednesday January 25, 2006

All new ... there is now an interface for creating legacy accounts [1] (http://www.ugrad.physics.mcgill.ca/Legacy). You supply your ADS authentication and desired legacy account name an it will be created. If you have a legacy account already this interface will also update the password to match your ADS pasword.

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Are legacy accounts superior?

  • If you prefer logging in with a username like orchard rather that mark.orchard-webb@mcgill.ca ... YES!
  • If you want to have X forwarding work when logging in remotely ... YES!
  • If you have a real name which contains accents which cause the GECOS record forwarded by the Vintella VAS client to contain garbage, including assignment, which several security measures view as an attempt to exploit and thus deny you access ... I would guess YES!
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Status

Presently only Ganesh recognizes new legacy accounts. In the fullness of time I shall propagate them to all the Linux workstations. For the moment you can still get in by logging in with your ADS name, open an Xterm and typing ssh username@ganesh, you can also do this through a Windows box, but unless you are using Cygwin or some other Xserver you can't get the graphics.


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Webpages

The physical location of user webpages is ganesh:/mnt/areopagus/username/public_html, if all is well with the universe there should be a symlink from the user's home directory to this location.

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Resources

  • Help:Desktop - This page might have some tips about using the desktop.
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