The Department runs a computing facility for faculty, staff, and graduate students located in Malott Hall room 103. The Department also provides and maintains computers for regular and visiting faculty and staff, and provides computing facilties for its REU program. Undergraduate students are provided for primarily by computer labs run by the University and individual colleges, but access to Department systems can be provided for undergrads who need to use the Department's specialized mathematical software. See this page for more information.
Home directories are located on the linux file servers pooh and simplex and are shared via NFS to all the department Linux machines. Data is backed up regularly; backups are normally retained for 7 days.
The Department also operates an AFS (Andrew File System) server. Files on this server can be shared not only to department Linux machines, but to other computers anywhere in the world. Contact the systems staff for more information.
You can download files from and upload them to your home directory via our webdisk system. This also allows you to edit some files in place.
The Department uses Spamassassin for system-wide spam filtering. It is no longer necessary for users to run it themseleves. Spamassassin assigns a "spam score" to each message; if the score is 6 or higher, it puts a [spam] tag on the subject line. If the score is 9 or higher, the message is rejected and an error message returned to the sender.
If you also want to keep a copy here, make the line read instead as
\username, jose@new.place.xyz
If you do this, make sure you clean out your local mailbox occasionally!
It's important that the protections on the
.forward file should not allow writability by any non-system
accounts on the system (e.g. chmod 644 .forward) Otherwise our
sendmail system will for security reasons silently ignore your forwarding
instruction!
You can also set forwarding using the webmail system.
The Department follows all Cornell University policies protecting the privacy of email messsages. However, users should keep in mind that email is not a very private medium; we advise you not to use email to send sensitive or confidential information unless you use strong encryption.
The gpg encryption software package is installed on our Linux systems and can be used to strongly encrypt email. Note that to get the full privacy that this software can provide, you need to be careful in its configuration and use.
You should not tie up the console of a shared machine with long-running
computing jobs. Instead, see these instructions
for running jobs without having to stay logged in.
Your account comes with web space. To use it, create a folder in you rhome directory called html. Make sure it is readable (but not writable) by all users. Place your website files in this directory; your home page should be named index.html. If this file is not present, people who go to your website will see a "permission denied" error.
You can edit the files in your html directory directly on one of
our Linux machines; the graphical HTML editor Kompozer is available, or you can use any text editor. You can also prepare the files on another computer
and use the webmail system's "webdisk" feature to upload them. The
web design program
Dreamweaver is installed on the Macs in room 103.
You can also edit HTML files directly with the HTML editor that is part of the webdisk system. To do this, create a file with the extension .html; you will then see an "EditHTML" option next to the file name. Note that this editor is best used for new or simple pages; it may not be able to handle complex HTML that was created by another program.
Web Publishing
Computer FAQ | Department Home Page