Computer Facilities Overview

Facilties

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.

Systems and Software

• The central Math Department system is primarily a linux system located in room 103. (A second facility is set up during the summer for the REU program.) Equipment in this room includes:
  • Approximately 20 Redhat linux workstations
  • Two HP black-and-white duplexing laser printers.
  • An HP-4500 color laser printer.
  • One Windows machine, abel.
  • Two Power Mac G5's and an Intel Mac
  • An HP scanner connected to abel.
• There is also a laser printer named fac in room 514 for the use of faculty and visitors, and a printer in room 218 for people on that floor.
• Some Linux machines in room 103 are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 4; others are running Scientific Linux version 5, a derivative of RHEL 5.
• The machines Reuleaux1 thru 4 and Chepe1 thru 4 are running 64-bit Linux; the other Linux machines in room 103 are running 32-bit Linux. To check, run the command uname -a. The response will include either "i686," for 32-bit systems, or "x86_64," for 64-bit ones. The 64-bit machines offer a larger virtual memory space. Most 32-bit programs work on 64-bit machines, but the reverse is not true.
• For intense computation, we have "back room" machines that can be only accessed remotely. Mathvader1 has 16 GB of memory; Mathvader2 thru 11 have 8 GB. All are dual-CPU 64-bit machines. Recent acquisitions are the "Octopus", which has 8 dual-core CPUs and 128 GB of memory, and the "Squid" which has 2 dual-core CPUs and 64 GB of memory. Contact the systems staff if you want access to these machines.
• To list all packages installed on a machine, rpm -qa . You can pipe that to grep in order to find particular packages of interest; e.g. rpm -qa | grep gnuplot. To list all files in a package rpm -ql packagename For example rpm -ql gnuplot-3.7.1-17 . To find out what package a file belongs to, rpm -qf pathtofile e.g. rpm -qf /usr/bin/dos2unix. Note that this only applies to software that is part of the Red Hat distribution; software that the Department has installed (see below) cannot be located this way.
• Software that is not a part of the Red Hat distribution is installed directly below /usr/local2 (all machines), /usr/LicenseLimited, and /usr/local_64 (64-bit machines)

  Home Directories

  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 on an experimental basis. 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.

  Email

  Your Address

  is user@math.cornell.edu.

  Department vs University email

  The Math Department's email system is separate from the University system run by Cornell Information Technologies. Most people thus have 2 addresses, user@math.cornell.edu and netid@cornell.edu. It is usually wise to select one of these systems as primary and have mail from the other system forwarded to it.

  Options for reading email

  Pine

  Pine is a popular and easy-to-use terminal-based Linux mail program, and is available on all our systems. More info can be found here.

  Thunderbird

  Thunderbird is a full-featured graphical-user-interface mail system. However, it keeps mail in its own folders, and that mail is not accessible from Pine, Webmail or other clients.

  Evolution

  Evolution is also available, and is recommended for those who like Microsoft Outlook. Like Thunderbird, it keeps mail in its own folders.

  Other GUIs

  Other GUI options inluce balsa and kmail

  Mail

  The good old Linux "mail" program is available, as are Elm and Mutt.

  Webmail

  The Department now has a webmail system, allowing you to read your email from any web browser. It uses the same folder structure as Pine, so you can go back and forth between Pine and webmail at will. It also has a feature called "webdisk" that allows downloading files from, and uploading files to, your home directory. Most accounts created in 2006 or later come with access to webmail; others can be updated for webmail access - just ask. The webmail system is at https://helix.math.cornell.edu/webmail.html.

  Spam Filtering

  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 12 or higher, the message is rejected and an error message returned to the user. This can be disabled for individual users on request. Users can also request "aggressive" spam filtering, in which messages with a score of 6 or higher are rejected.

  Mail Forwarding

  If you'd like your mail to username@math.cornell.edu forwarded, create a file called .forward (note the dot) in your home directory, containing a single line with the new address.

  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.

  University (CIT) Email

  General info

  CIT mail help on other mail clients

  (incl. outlook, pc-pine, mozilla, netscape) (The pc-pine page suggestion of changing your inbox-path entry to {postofficeN.mail.cornell.edu/SSL/user=NetID}inbox is a way to read your Cornell NetID mail on our unix systems.)

  Email Privacy

  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.

  Email 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.

  Special Media

  USB Sticks

  All RHEL 4 machines work well with plug-in USB flash memory drives, commonly called "USB sticks.". Simply plug the drive into any USB port on the machine. An icon will appear on your desktop giving access to the drives; in the shell environment, it appears under /media. Before removing the drive, right-click on the icon and select "unmount volume."

  Floppies, CD's, and Zip Disks

  Burning CD's

  Intensive Computing

  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.

  Web Publishing

  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, or you can 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.

  Computer FAQ | Department Home Page

  Last Update: June 16, 2008