CCIS Systems-supported Linux alpha test

CCIS Systems is working on support for Linux, and as part of this process we have two machines (galaga and pacman) running the Ubuntu 6.06 (codename Dapper Drake) distribution of Linux available for general use in room 102 WVH (the main lab). The machines are in a little alcove in the far right corner as you come in the door, alongside two Crew Linux project machines.

Executive summary

There are two Systems-supported Linux machines in the corner of room 102, on which you have access to your CCIS home and scratch directories. Anybody who can log in on the Solaris machine should also be able to log in on those two machines (on the console or remotely via ssh).
The environment on those machines is alpha-quality and considerably different from the environment on the Solaris machines, and you should only try using them if you are a relatively sophisticated Unix or Linux user, able to debug the problems you are very likely to encounter.
Email inboxes are not currently available through the filesystem on those machines, but you can read and send email with graphical clients as you would on a PC.
If you have questions or requests about those machines, please send them to linux@ccs.neu.edu rather than to systems.
Again, these are not yet considered a fully-supported part of our production lab environment. They may reboot without warning (and almost certainly will reboot every Wednesday around midday).

Who should participate in this alpha-test

These two machines allow login by anybody with a CCIS Unix account. However, the environment is nowhere near polished yet, nor fully integrated with our Solaris environment, so we only recommend that you experiment with these machines if you are (1) already somewhat familiar with Linux and Solaris, to the extent that you can figure out and work around problems, and (2) willing to report bugs and problems, but (3) patient if bugs and problems don't get fixed quickly. The Systems Linux boxes may also be rebooted remotely with little or no notice (and will be rebooted every Wednesday during our maintenance window!), and regular updates might break things for extended periods of time. Relying on these machines for your coursework is a bad idea at this point.

Systems-supported Linux and Crew Linux

CCIS Systems owes a large debt to Crew, the Volunteer Systems Group at CCIS who pioneered support for Linux at CCIS. Crew have two of their own Linux machines available in 102 (right next to the Systems Linux machines), and you can learn more about the Crew Linux project (and learn how to request an account) on the Crew Linux page.

Crew's Linux environment is currently more sophisticated than the Systems Linux alpha program, although we hope to gradually catch up to them as time goes on. From an end-user perspective, there are two main differences between Systems' and Crew's Linux environment:

The Crew Linux environment is more current and more cutting-edge. Systems is using version 6.06 of Ubuntu, because it will be supported longer with updates. Crew is using version 6.10 (Edgy Eft) as I write this.
The Systems Linux environment shares user accounts and home directories with the Solaris machines – you have access to the same home directories (and scratch and /proj directories) on them as on the Solaris (and Windows) machines.

Systems-supported Linux and Solaris

Because the Systems-supported Linux machines and the Solaris machines all access your home directory (and store configuration files in your home directory), but they have different versions of software and different fonts and directory structures, you may find you have problems going back and forth between the Linux and Solaris machines. This is particularly true if you use Gnome as your windowing environment on Solaris. While we will be happy to help you if you run into problems, you might find it frustrating to try the Systems Linux environment unless you are experienced enough to diagnose and fix problems with your configuration files on your own.

I (Jay, the Unix sysadmin) use Gnome on both Solaris and Systems Linux with only minor cosmetic problems, but I've known people to have trouble going back and forth.

If you want to use Linux, but don't want to have to deal with these sorts of problems, you may want to request an account on the Crew Linux machines instead.

Although your home directory is shared between Solaris and (Systems) Linux, much of the rest of the CCIS infrastructure is (deliberately) not shared between the two environments. In some cases this is just because we aren't done with the integration work, but in most cases it's because we expect to use new, different infrastructure in the final Linux environment.

Notably, the files under /ccs are not available (although if you need to you can get at them via the path /net/ccs), and software is not installed into /arch and /share the way it is on Solaris.

One notable consequence of this is that your PATH environment variable (and perhaps other settings) will need to be different on the Systems Linux machines. We hope to make this automatic and transparent for the final Linux environment, but for now, I have code like this in my .zshrc file:

case `/bin/uname` in
Linux) . $HOME/.zshrc.linux
       ;;
esac

and I have all the Linux-specific settings in my .zshrc.linux file. If your shell is zsh or bash, this code snippet should work as-is (in your .zshrc or .bashrc; if your shell is the default tcsh the syntax is different but the same approach should work.

Reliability and downtime

We will be actively working on these machines on a regular basis. We may need to reboot them with little or no warning. We plan on rebooting them after applying updates every Wednesday sometime between 11:45am and 1:45pm, with no warning (but we might do this at any time). While we hope not, it is possible that sometimes these updates will break things, and something that worked fine on Tuesday will be broken on Thursday.

Reporting problems and getting help

For now, we ask that all questions about the CCIS Systems-supported Linux alpha-test be directed to linux@ccs.neu.edu, and not to systems@ccs.neu.edu. When the Linux machines leave beta testing and become a fully-supported part of our production environment, of course, we'll support them in exactly the same way as we support our current Solaris and Windows machines, but for now, we want to keep questions and requests about them separate from questions and requests about our production environment.

What doesn't work yet

Traditional Unix email clients like pine, mutt, mh, and elm don't work for access to your inbox through the filesystem. There's some work I need to do to make sure they handle locking properly before I feel safe turning on access to your inbox over NFS on the Linux machines.

For now, you can either (1) ssh to a Solaris machine (like login.ccs.neu.edu) to read your mail with a terminal-based client, or you can configure a graphical mail client like Sylpheed or Mozilla Mail to access your inbox via IMAP to imap.ccs.neu.edu and send mail via SMTP to smtp.ccs.neu.edu, as you would on a Mac or Windows machine. You can also use our (very bare-bones) webmail service at http://webmail.ccs.neu.edu/.