Welcome to the OCF ------------------ This file is displayed when you first log in, and only the first time you log in. We STRONGLY advise that you read this document from beginning to end, it is very important, and not all that long... if you really don't want to read it now, you can hit "Q" and it'll go away. If you want to look at it again at a later time, the command "newuser" will show it again. IMPORTANT: If you are logged in from console (That means being physically in front of one of our machines, they have big screens and a mouse) you are using the X-Window System. You MUST have your mouse-pointer in the window that you want to use. Throughout this document, we'll talk about things that we want you to type. You will know what we want you to type because we put the command in quotes(""). You should NOT actually type the quotes, just the contents of them. The sections of this document are: o Introduction to the Open Computing Facility of U.C. Berkeley o The UNIX Command Line, and how to work with it o How to change your password, and why you should o Electronic Mail o The Mail Program o Editing files o Where to go for more help o Ack! The Rules! o The OCF: An experiment in student-run computing o Conclusion Introduction to the Open Computing Facility of U.C. Berkeley ------------------------------------------------------------ We are a cluster of about 24 Apollo Workstations. We also have several Sun Sparcs and Integrix Sparc clones lying around. There are also a couple of DEC's and some X-term only machines in our Eshleman lab. A volunteer staff of students administers these machines. These staff members are not paid, nor are they necessarily affiliated with or have any official capacity in the university other than being students. Try to remember that these people are students, they have midterms too! The OCF serves the people at the University of California at Berkeley. That means that students, faculty, staff and people otherwise affiliated with the University of California at Berkely can get an account here. Location: The OCF is located in room 72 in the basement of Barrows Hall and in the back of Heller Lounge on the second floor of the MLK Student Union. Availability: The OCF machines are available for remote login twenty-four hours a day and when Heller Lounge is open, on console. Consoles can only be accessed from Heller/MLK, while users can remotely log in by telephone or other terminals on (or off) campus. Staff people are available in Heller Lab during regular hours. You can find out what those hours are either by fingering staff@ocf (Type: "finger staff@ocf" at a UNIX prompt) or by referring to the posted sheet on the wall of Heller Lab. The UNIX Command line, and how to work with it ---------------------------------------------- (Or: I logged in. Now what?) Computers which run the Unix operating system, like the ones in the OCF, are sometimes called command-line oriented. This means that like an IBM PC clone and unlike a Macintosh, you get the computer to do things by typing the name of the program you want to run to a system prompt. The default prompt on machines in the OCF looks like this: apocalypse [100] Note: You SHOULDN'T type "apocalypse [100]"! That is your PROMPT, as in, something that computer shows you to PROMPT you for another command. In addition, apocalypse [100] is an example, your prompt is not always the same thing. The first word is the name of the machine you're logged into; the number is the number of the command you're about to type, which is useful for repeating a command. Some Unix other systems are set up to use "%" as their prompt; the prompt on the OCF acts the same, but gives you a bit more information. You can run commands to read and send electronic mail, to edit and read text files, to read network news, compile and run your own programs, and so on. How to change your password, and why you should ----------------------------------------------- o passwd To change your password, type at a UNIX prompt, "passwd" Then follow the instructions. You should change your password both to protect your information and to protect the OCF. There are malicious people on the net who will try to guess your password by trying words from the dictionary, for example. If they figure out your password, they can do everything you can do, including send mail, post network news, and compile and run their own programs. We have in the past seen people break into accounts here to use as a base to break into accounts at other schools and companies. If the OCF develops a reputation as a place to do this from, it's possible that the University may take away our network access. Good passwords usually have letters in different cases, and either a number or a punctuation symbol in them. They also are usually not an English word, a common name, or a word from popular pieces of "hacker" fiction like Star Trek, Tolkien, Doctor Who, and the like. For example, a past OCF root password was "gorb@chev". The technique of taking a common word and replacing one letter with a symbol or a number is a good one, and easier to remember than a random combination of letters and numbers. Please don't share your password with others. Other Berkeley people can get their own account if they want; people not at Berkeley aren't allowed to use our machines. You will be held responsible for anything done with your account, regardless of whether it was really you or not. Electronic Mail --------------- E-mail is a computer based system of regular mail. Where in real life you'd write a letter on a piece of paper, put it into an envelope, address the envelope and stamp it, the computer will do much of this for you. The only two things you need to know in order to send E-mail is the address of the person you are sending mail to and what you want to send to him/her. Addresses are made up of a user name and a computer. For instance, your login is your address at the OCF. Instead of typing, "user at ocf", we replace 'at' with a @ sign, so the address looks like: @ocf.berkeley.edu Example: My user login is chaos, so my address is: chaos@ocf.berkeley.edu Note: Here I'm using the ocf's full address. This is the address that you should give other people so that they can mail you. (Of course, replace "chaos" with your own user name, I don't want to get deluged with everyone's mail...) You'll have to talk to your friends to find out what their e-mail addresses are. If you are mailing a person who's computer also is something.berkeley.edu, you can leave off the .berkeley.edu, it's something that our computers can figure out for themselves. Finally, if you are mailing a person on the OCF, you don't have to tell the computers any address, you can just mail the user. What does all this mean? Well, your official address is @ocf.berkeley.edu (with being your login without the brackets) and anyone can mail you at that address. People on the UC Berkeley campus can simply mail you as @ocf and other people on the OCF can just mail you as An important address is staff@ocf.berkeley.edu That's a good place to ask questions if you're having trouble making something work or want to know how to do something. We have several programs that handle E-mail for you on the OCF. The most basic(and most standard) program is called mail. It's not very easy to learn, nor is it very helpful. We also offer more sophisticated programs to deal with mail, including: mh, elm, mush, elm, and recently, pine. Although the mail program is the only one described here, we strongly urge you to either to try or read the manual pages for the other mail programs. Pine was written specifically to be user-friendly, so you might like to try that one first. The Mail Program ---------------- Sending electronic mail is one of the most common uses of the OCF. The most common mail program OCF users use is called PINE. So at the prompt, you want to type "pine": apocalypse [100] pine The first time you run pine, it will make you a directory called 'Mail' - all of your saved mail goes into this directory. From the PINE main menu, type "c" for 'compose'. This will start up a new message for you. It will then ask you for four things: 'To,' 'Cc,' 'Attchmnt,' and 'Subject.' The only one that is absolutely necessary is 'To.' It should look something like this after you're done: To :
Cc : , , , <...> Attchmnt: Subject : where
, , etc. is the electronic mail address of the person you're sending mail to. You can leave the Cc section blank if you want to- it stands for "Carbon Copy" - it just means that the addresses in the Cc section will get a copy of the Email. At this point, you can fill out the subject line with the subject of your message, type return, and start typing the body of your message. PINE will automatically press return for you at the end of a line. When you're done, press "-X" to send the mail. To read your mail using pine, make sure you're in PINE and just type "i" from the main menu. It will look in your current mail file (it defaults to your INBOX, or where all your mail is delivered) and list them all for you. Just use the arrow keys to highlight your selection and press enter. If you want to return to the index from reading a message, just type "i" again. Editing files ------------- In order to edit a text file, you need to use a program called a text editor. We have a couple floating around the OCF. A more unix-traditional one is vi, and a more powerful, larger, and _MUCH_ slower one is named emacs. Which editor is better to use is a subject of much debate and argument in the Unix community, but it's mostly a matter of taste. There are instructions on how to use vi in the help system, detailed below. Emacs has a tutorial built in; you start emacs by typing "emacs" on the command line. Hitting control-h and then t while in Emacs will start the tutorial. For completeness, the help system has an emacs tutorial in it too.. There's also a third editor, named jove, which uses many of the same commands as emacs, but is smaller and faster to start up. To run the jove tutorial, type "teachjove" at the command line. Finally, if you like Pine's editor, you can use it outside of Pine by typing "pico" at the command line prompt. Pico offers features that many of the other text editors don't. (Actually, they do but the features are harder to figure out in jove/emacs/vi.) Among the more useful things are Pico's auto word-wrapping around the right hand side of the screen and the interactive spell checker. A text file is really the basic unit of information in Unix. Learning to use an editor well will greatly increase the number of things you can do. Where to go for more help ------------------------- Unix has some help facilities built in. One of the most important is "man", which is short for "manual page". It will print a description of the command you give it as an argument. For example, "man mail" will tell you about the mail command. There's also a program called help. It lets you access files written by OCF staffers about various system topics, including Unix commands, reading network news, printing, and so on. To run it, just type "help". We strongly urge you to look through help's files! There is a lot of useful information for users packed into help. OCF Staff can also help you. If you have questions and can't find the answer in the man pages or in help, then send mail to staff@ocf and we'll be glad to help you out. The OCF also co-sponsors a number of seminars called Help Sessions. These hour-and-a-half drop-in sessions introduce the user to UNIX and various other topics such as editing, which UNIX programs do what, and the Internet. There are also several good books out about Unix and various Unix utilities. Both ASUC General Books and Cody's carry a selection. You can also find books in the campus libraries and in the CSUA Library in 343 Soda. Ack! The Rules! ---------------- Every computer facility, even a student run one like the OCF, must have some rules. Ours include: * No sharing your account with others. Much as your buddy in Walla Walla wants to call up and play nethack, you really shouldn't let her. People who are Berkeley students can get their own account; people who aren't Berkeley students shouldn't be using Berkeley machines. * There is a 16 megabyte disk quota. This includes files in your account and your mail spool. We will warn you if you go over quota, and going over for a couple days while you download a particular piece of software is fine. But don't let it go beyond that. If you have a piece of software which you want to share with others, let staff know and we'll install it for the whole cluster (and get it out of your disk quota...) You can always type "quota -v" to check your current disk quota usage. * Don't harass other users. This includes both people on the OCF and those across the net. This is part of campus policy as well as OCF policy. As an OCF user, you have certain rights as well. * You can attend and voice your opinion at any OCF meeting. General meetings are held three times a semester, and the smaller Board of Directors meets once a week. Officers are elected at the first General Meeting of each semester, usually held during the third week of classes. We strongly urge you to get involved with the way your cluster is run! * Your privacy will be respected by OCF Staff at all times. Sometimes a piece of mail will bounce to staff, but this is a rarity. Other times we may need to look at a file in your account in order to figure out why something is breaking. Other than that, and barring a system break in, you can be reasonably sure that people won't be reading stuff you don't want them to read. A full copy of the OCF User Policy is in /usr/local/OCF/Official_Documents/OCF_User_Policy. It's worth a read. The OCF: An experiment in student-run computing ------------------------------------------------ As far as we know, the OCF is the only student-run general-purpose Unix cluster at any university. An elected body of students, the Board of Directors, sets policy, and two elected officers, a General Manager and a Site Manager, implement it. Users are always welcome to voice their opinions about how things are running. The Board meets once a week, and you're welcome to attend these meetings or join the Board. Our constitution is in the directory /usr/local/OCF/Official_Documents, along with the current bylaws. In Conclusion ------------- Welcome to the OCF. We hope you find it a useful addition to your university education. In case you forgot, passwd is the command to change your password. Be sure to make it something not easily guessed, with at least one digit or punctuation character in it. Feedback on this document should be sent to staff@ocf. The command "newuser" will print it again.