CCIS Systems-supported Linux alpha test

CCIS Systems now supports Linux. We have four machines (bomberman, defender, galaga, and pacman) running the Ubuntu 8.04 (codename Hardy Heron) distribution of Linux available for general use in room 102 WVH (the main lab). The machines are on the ends of several of the rows of Solaris and Windows machines nearest the big glass wall.

galaga and pacman are Dell Optiplex 745s; the other two machines are older Dell GX240s.

Executive summary

There are four Systems-supported Linux machines in 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 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.

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.

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.

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. (Instead, most software is installed onto local disk.)

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.