Using the central UNIX service

Windows terminal icon

Facilities available

A Sun Microsystems research-oriented compute server called unix0.

This system is a Sun-Fire-V890 server with 8 dual-core 1.2Ghz sparcv9 processors and 40Gb main memory running Solaris 10.

Registration

Access restrictions apply to the Central Unix Service. To register to use the systems, visit My IT Account, select the Account Details tab and follow the IDM link to register for the relevant optional facilities.

Logging into a compute server

We recommend you use the PuTTY secure shell application to access unix0. PuTTY is installed on all supported offices and classroom PCs.

Usernames and passwords

When logging into a UNIX system you must type your username in lower case. Your username and password are the same as for Windows.

Filestore

Each user has a directory allocated on our central user filestore. This filestore can be accessed from any of the UNIX systems and also from many networked PCs and Macintoshes. Your UNIX home directory is the M: drive on a supported Windows PC. The w2k directory in your home directory is the H: drive.

If you exceed your disk quota, you will be unable to create new files. You will receive a login warning when you're close to your disk quota limit. To check your quota, use the command:

% checkquota

If you have problems with your quota, contact the IT Support Office.

Local directories

Locally produced software and non-standard, public domain or other unsupported utilities are held in directory trees starting with /usr/local, /usr/sfw, /opt/csw and /usr/appl The directories concerned include:

/bin - Executable files

/lib - Library and support files

/man - Manual pages for files in /bin

/doc - Documentation files

/include - Header files for inclusion in programs

By default these areas are included in your search path BEFORE any of the standard areas such as /bin and /usr/bin. If you change your path, you should keep e.g. /usr/local/bin early on in your search path, or some locally-implemented utilities may cease to work. It is also advisable to append to the search path provided rather than replacing it.

Shells

The default shell is the TC-shell (tcsh) which is similar to the standard C-Shell (csh) and provides additional facilities. The Bourne shell (sh), Korn shell (ksh) and the C-Shell (csh) are also available.

Editors

There are many editors available including emacs and vim, and the standard UNIX editors ed and vi.

Core files

The default action taken by the UNIX operating system following a fatal error in a program is to dump all the memory in use by the program when it crashed into a file called "core" in your current directory. The resulting file is only useful if you are actively developing a program, so in order to save disk space, core dump files are limited to a size of 2 Kbytes by default. In order to re-enable them, you can use the command:

% unlimit core

 

Access to the web

Direct access to the web is available using the Lynx browser:

% lynx

Network access

Interactive use

The usual UNIX command ssh is available for calling other Internet host computers, eg:

% ssh unix0.york.ac.uk

File transfer

File transfer is available to and from other Internet hosts which support the ftp and sftp protocols, eg:

% ftp gatekeeper.dec.com

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