These are notes concerning the new mac
lab. I intend to add things periodically.
The new mac lab infrastructure is radically different from that
used with the Suns. The accounts and passwords used on the Macs
and for the new Landmark Redhat Linux servers are separate from
those on the Suns or the Windows boxes. Eventually, the lab Suns
may also be migrated to this new authentication infrastructure as
well.
When you are logged into a CERI lab Mac, /gaia/home/<your
id> will show you your Mac disk space, which is hosted off of
an Apple server. You have 50GB of disk space available to you
there. To access your home directory on the Suns, you would access
/gaia/sunspace/<your id>. When logged into the Suns, you may
access your lab Mac disk space as /gaia/macspace/<your id>.
You may ignore /gaia/linuxspace for now as it is the same (for
now) as /gaia/sunspace.
YOU are responsible for backing up your
home directory space on the lab Macs. If there is a hardware
failure on the server and you do not have a current backup of
your work, the results will be most unfortunate. For the purpose
of backing up, the lab Macs have a DVD writer (Apple
Superdrive), USB 2.0 ports, and Firewire 800 ports. You can plug
your own USB or firewire devices into these ports to make
backups or provide your own writable DVDs. External hard drives
and USB keys are very inexpensive these days. If you care about
the contents of your home directory, I would strongly advise
obtaining such a device and doing backups regularly.
Please DO
NOT unplug
any of the lab Macs from the network for any reason. Try to avoid
rebooting them unless absolutely necessary. They need to be on the
network and available for the CERI Mac lab infrastructure to
work properly.
It turns out that the shells tcsh and csh are one and the same
binary executable on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (the version of Mac
OS X the lab Macs currently run). From what I have seen, they
behave identically (not that I have done much beyond checking
basic command completion). If you provide your own .cshrc or
.tcshrc, YOU are entirely responsible
for fixing any issues relating to it.
Mac OS X is an incredibly complex, capable, and inclusive
operating system. It incorporates just about any feature from
every other Unix in existence which anyone at Apple thought
might be useful (and some that are quite arguable). It provides
interfaces to other OS sharing facilities (NFS, AFS, SMB/CIFS).
In fact, there is so much available in Mac OS X, that it is
quite difficult to attempt to grasp all of its' capabilities (in
my opinion). The learning curve, from the Unix perspective, can
be quite daunting from the sheer mass of available features and
facilities. Of course, if you stick with the basics you have
learned on the Suns, most things are essentially the same (they
share a common heritage of one of the major branches of Unix,
BSD Unix, but things have evolved quite a lot since then.)
I have found machines in the CERI Mac Lab still logged in and
unlocked a number of times now, where some application had
stopped the logout process (iTunes, DVD player, Matlab) and the
person more than likely thought just hitting logout was
sufficient. DO NOT consider yourself logged out of a Mac until
you see MAC OS X login screen reappear on the monitor.