The network consists of both publicly available and privately owned machines. The public machines are located in FSL 345 and FSL 231. There are about 40 Sun workstations of various computing power. On the same network, you will also find PCs and Macintoshes as well as printers, plotters, tape drives, and a digitizer.

 The support costs for the Sun systems is covered by flat fees for the private machines and public users. The current cost is $3800/year for a private machine and $500/year for a public user. A private machine has been purchased by a particular project and used at the discretion of the project leader. Any number of users are allowed on the private machine at no additional cost. For those projects that don't have machines of their own, or too many users to be supported by the machines they have, public machines are available. When you are a public user, you may use any of the public machines (listed below) for the $500/year fee. You may also use any private machine with the permission of the project. Users of private machines may not log into, or use the disk space available, on the public machines. The exception is "sorbus", which has both a tape drive and the digitizer attached. "Sorbus" is located in FSL 345.

Myrica, and salmo are still running SunOS 4.1.3, and only run OpenWindows. The other machines are running Solaris 2.5 or higher, and you have a choice of OpenWindows or CDE.

 Disk space is also allocated on a private vs. public philosophy. Private users have their home directories (the directory in which you are placed when you log in) on the private machines, and public users have their home directories currently on "larix." You generally want to keep your home directory uncluttered, and use the /data directories for work such as image processing or GIS.

 If you are a public user, you can use the command "pubspace" to show how much space is available on the public disks. The numbers provided are in kilobytes, and the third row of numbers are what is available. For private users, please check with someone in your project for data space.

There are both black & white and color output devices on the network. Here is a list of the more common output devices. You will use these names in the print commands given a little later in this document.
 
 

If you are a private user, there may be more printers available to you. Please check with your project.

There is currently one tape drive publicly available on "myrica". It is an Exabyte 8505 which can write up to 10GB of compressed data on an 8mm tape. The device name is /dev/rst1. (Needed for the tar command given later).

There is also a Calcomp 9100 digitizer connected to "myrica". You need to use the "arc7" command to get into the correct version of Arc/Info.

Here is a short list of some of the applications available on the Sun workstations. They are listed with the name of the command that will start them, and a brief description.
 

Be courteous to other users! Please follow these simple rules:

1. Do NOT process large data sets on the /users (home) disk. Use the public /data disks if you are a public users, or private disks if you are a private user.
2. Check that space is available before beginning any process that will eat up disk space. If you fill up a disk, other users will be unable to access their files until space is freed. Use the "df ." command to find out how much space is available on the current disk.
3. If you will be tying up a resource (CPU, printer, plotter) for any extended period of time, please let other users know (unix@fsl.orst.edu). Better yet, do the task during non-work hours, if possible.

Now that you have an overview of what is available on the FSLAN, let's apply the information to actual UNIX commands. Please remember that UNIX is case sensitive. "Vi" will get you

"Vi: Command not found",

however "vi" will get you a text editor.

Use the command "yppasswd" to change your password, particularly when you receive your initial password. You will prompted for your old password, and then your new one twice. If you don't enter the new one the same both times, the process fails and you have to run the program again.

Choose a password that is easy for you to remember. Make it 6-8 characters in length, preferably with a mix of letters and numbers or special characters (!@#$%^&*). Because,  UNIX is case-sensitive, a mix of upper and lower case letters makes a password more difficult for someone to guess. Please don't use your user name, first or last name, or simple dictionary words.

Environment variables are generally set in your .cshrc and .login files in your home directory. Your home directory is the directory where you start from when you log in. These variables tell the UNIX shell important information about where to look for resources. For instance, the PATH environment variable is used to list all of the possible directories that executable files might be located. That way, you can type say "arc71" to start ARC/INFO 7.1.1, and you don't have to know where that executable is located. In the Cshell, environment variables are set with "setenv" in the form

setenv <variable name> "value".

<variable name> is generally in all capitals, but is not a requirement. With setenv, the variable is inherited from the current shell to any other subshells that may be started. You may also use the form:

set <variable name>="value" for the current shell. In the Bourne Shell, you use two commands to set an environment variable that gets inherited:

<variable name>="value";export <variable name>

The ; is used to separate commands on the same line. You may also put each command on a separate line. If you don't need the variable to last beyond the current shell, you can leave off the export <variable name>.

Many of the applications available allow you to print from within them. There are also commands available to print from the command line. Although Solaris 2.x provides for backward compatibility with SunOS, both printing methods will be discussed. The System V (Solaris 2.x) version of printing does tend to produce better results, particularly in the realm of canceling jobs.

Generally, you have a default printer set in your .login file by setting the environment variable PRINTER. If your .login has been unmodified, the default will be "fsl217ps", which is the LaserJet 5si in FSL 217. On the Solaris machines, a default is also set at the system level and is most often set to the closest black & white printer.

To print a file named "test.print" to the default printer, you enter the following command:

lpr test.print

To override the default printer and print to a different printer, use "lpr" with "-P" option as shown:

lpr -Pprintqueue test.print

Where printqueue is the name of the printer.

The command to check the print queues in UNIX is "lpq" and without any options, will check the default print queue. It accepts options just like "lpr" and reports back the Job numbers of jobs in the print queue. So the command:

lpq -Pprintqueue

Will display jobs in the printqueue print queue.

To remove jobs from a UNIX print queue, you must first get the job number of the print job you want to remove by using "lpq." Once you have done that, you can use "lprm" to remove the print job. The command would be:

lprm -Pprintqueue JOB

You should only be able to remove your own print jobs.

To print a file named "test.print" to the default printer, you enter the following command:

lp test.print

To override the default printer and print to a different printer, use "lpr" with "-P" option as shown:

lp -d printqueue test.print

Where printqueue is the name of the printer.

The command to check the print queues in UNIX is "lpstat -o" and without any options, will check the default print queue. Include the print queue name to check other than the default. So the command:

lpstat -o printqueue

Will display jobs in the printqueue print queue.

To remove jobs from a UNIX print queue, you must first get the job name of the print job you want to remove by using "lpstat" Once you have done that, you can use "cancel" to remove the print job. The command would be:

cancel jobname

You should only be able to remove your own print jobs.

                    also see http://www.fsl.orst.edu/helpdesk/gis/unix-basics.html for more information

To find out more information about the UNIX commands listed above, or about any other UNIX command or topic, you can use the UNIX on-line manual pages program called, "man." The UNIX on-line manual page program is started by typing "man topic" where topic can be a command or a UNIX topic. Typing the following:

man ls

Will give you information about using the "ls" command. Typing:

man man

Will give you information about using the on-line manual pages, and typing:

man -k keyword

Will search through all of the UNIX on-line manual pages looking for pages that have references to keyword in them.

If you can not find a particular man page for some piece of software on the system, you can type "echo $MANPATH" to see what your MANPATH variable is set to. This will display where the system will look for man pages. Usually everything will be set up correctly. If you type "which application_name" you will find the path to the application, and this will help you to find where the man pages for that application are located.