The following sections detail, or bring attention to, the localised setup of unix.lancs.ac.uk and how it differs from other Unix systems out there, it also contains quick details of useful local programs.
As mentioned in many other places in this document there is a selection of programs installed in what is called the “homegrown” section of the Unix server.
Programs that are in “homegrown” are not officially supported by the Unix admins, instead they are supported by the person who installed them, to quote from the documentation:
Be aware that if you install software in this area then you are expected to be able to provide support to any users who have problems with the software which you install
Also use of these programs that annoys the admins in any way may get your account suspended (such as creating a lot of email bounces with fetchmail). Full information is available with the command:
% less /software/homegrown/doc/about_homegrown.txt
In order to use the homegrown software (which you will probably want to as it contains an awful lot of really useful programs) you need to run a command to adjust your shell environment variables. This command is:
% /usr/local/homegrown/bin/setup_homegrown.csh
Typing this every time you login can become tedious, and so to get around this problem simply add the following line to your .login:
source /usr/local/homegrown/bin/setup_homegrown.csh
Be aware that the concept of a “homegrown” area is not common to most Unix systems.
If at any point you need to have something changed about your account, the name being wrong, your groups (see section 2.4) being wrong or even that you have finished your Undergraduate years but will be staying on to do postgraduate studies there is one port of call for getting all this sorted.
ISS Reception (which is opposite the Librarians, ground floor of the library) can deal with all these matters.
Also if you forget the password for your account, which does sometimes happen, then ISS reception can change it to a new one (at which point you should then change your password to something else, see section 2.5). They cannot find your old password however, as for security it is held in an encrypted form.
When your account at Lancaster is created the passwords between your Unix account and Windows account are synchronised, so if the Windows password is changed the Unix password will also change.
However some people would rather have different passwords for Unix (and also Wing) and Windows. This can be done with the use of the sync_passwd script.
To determine if your passwords are synchronised or not simply use:
% sync_passwd show
Then this can be toggled by typing:
% sync_passwd
See section 8.5 for information about procmail, and how the local system is setup to deal with .procmailrc files.
See section 4.12 for information about the “scratch space” available to you. Please note that again this is an additional feature of unix.lancs.ac.uk and is not standard to other Unix systems.
If you attempt to run very long jobs, or leave screen sessions running unattached for extremely long times, you may notice that your processes get killed and you receive a mail from root. This is the so called “process killing monster” that runs on Cent1 and keeps processes from running for too long and getting in the way of other people working.
Note that processes will be killed after about 24 hours, if you need to schedule a job that’s going to run for longer than that you should go and speak to the Unix admins (see section 13.13).
The “lan” command that enables you to get to your space on Central Files (see section 4.10) is a localised command and thus information about it won’t be available via Google.
There are a number of programs installed in various people’s home
directories. One user has taken to collecting symbolic links to all of these
programs in their own home directory, to make it easier for you to find them
all. Consult
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ clinch/almost-homegrown/ for details
The command that prints files from Unix systems is lp. This
is documented in man lp and
http://hedgehog:8080/help/printing.html
To check your print budget on the Unix cluster simply type:
% spoobudg
That will print out a message informing you of how much (in pounds and pence) your username has. For additional printer budget visit ISS Reception on the ground floor of the library.
LuBBs is the Lancaster University Bulletin Board System,
essentially it is an old-style BBS that runs entirely on the University Unix
server. It features conferences which you can post to and read messages on
diverse topics such as books, arts-crafts, computers, politics and
current-affairs. LuBBs also has a system of real-time chat to discuss things
with other members. Full details about its use and history are available
from
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/socs/lubbs/
The short answer is that once you’ve setup your account for homegrown access (see section 13.1) you can just type “lubbs”, it will recognise you are a new user and help you setup an account (be warned that your account will be limited at first until the SysOp has varied it, this will commonly take between 10 minutes and a few hours).
As documented in section 6 the default shell for the Lancaster Unix systems is tcsh. While this is a perfectly serviceable shell for day to day use, and even scripting, there are other shells available that you may wish to use.
In the event of wanting to change shell, most people will want to
change from tcsh to the “Bourne Again Shell” (bash). This is actually a
fairly simple thing to do, at the bottom of your ~/.login file (after all
the setenv lines for your environment variables, and probably sourcing the
homegrown script (see section 13.1) simply add:
exec bash --login
And thats “dash dash login”. Once the shell thats interpreting .login
reaches this line it will stop and execute the bash shell (which will of
course be in its path). The bash shell will start up and will read its own
config file at this point (which is ~/.bashrc).
Bash has several useful features, these being much nicer scripting control and
also several useful features (such as ^r to search backwards through
the history for a previously typed command).
For more documentation on bash see:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/index.html
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
man bash
The most noticeable differences will be that setting the prompt is slightly different, as you change an environment variable called $PS1 and the key to offer name-completions (see section 6.2) is the tab key by default.
The Unix system administrators are available via email for any questions or
requests you might have about the systems. If you send mail to systems
from cent1, or to systems at lancaster.ac.uk then it should reach them.
Be aware that this is not a method of getting support for the Unix systems. Support can be gained from the ISS helpdesks (in the Library). The sysadmins do not like being bothered needlessly and might well not appreciate frivolous emails.
However if you have serious comment then thats the best method.