Learning Group Computer Guide

Introduction

• CPU servers

These are fast machines that are intended to run programs.
 
• Workstations

These are machines that are intended for people to work with (editing, compiling, surfing the net, playing games (not!))
 
• CPU/Workstations

These are workstations with faster CPU (sometimes dual cpu) and much memory. They serve both functions.
 
• Windows Workstations

These machines run Windows (TM) operating system. They can be used to log in to other machines and to run MS-friendly applications.

CPU Usage Guidelines

To avoid conflicts, please try to use your common sense and to follow these simple guidelines:
 

• Be considerate! Don't do onto others what you don't want them to do to you.
• Heavy long term processes should be run on CPU/Mixed servers. Use workstations only when CPU servers are heavily used.
• Compilations, Netscape, editors, should be run on the machine you are currently facing.
• If you are running a job on a workstation please nice +19, so that the user working with it would not suffer long delays while typing in emacs.
• Make sure that the process does not consume more memory than the machine has!!! (In this case the machine will start paging and stop responding regardless of the nice you set)
• Night time is good for running heavy processes on workstations
• If a job is causing problems, try to contact owner before killing it. If you must kill it, use kill -STOP before resorting to more violent measures
• Again, be considerate

DISK Usage Guidelines

• Heavy Backuping (4 time a day+/two weeks back + on tape): your own home directory.
  Use for source code, TEX files and the like (hard to reproduce files).
• high reliability, low backup: The RAID
  we have a RAID (level 5 + one spare) called "duff" (/cs/duff[1..2(3?)]). This can withstand 2 disk failures without loss of data. use for normal work, large, hard to get, data sets and the such.
• no backup, no reliability: The local disks on the computers (named /cs/pmai[1-7] and /cs/[hmm, sound, hmm+, chord, pst, ....]). there is basicly NO BACKUP on those disks. On the other hand, it's been quite a while since the last disk fail, so this is fairly safe. Use for big, easy to download or reproduce databases, run results and the such. If you tend to work on one particular computer, try using the local Disk, as it is MUCH faster.

System Problems

Machines