3. User Environment

3.1 Keeping Up Appearances

Using a node of the ILP should appear only slightly different than logging into a linux desktop remotely. The primary difference is that some disk areas are shared between all of the ILP nodes. At the time of writing, the following areas are shared:

• /cdf/home - User home areas (500MB quota per user)
• /cdf/spool - User spool areas (500MB quota per user)
• /cdf/scratch - User scratch areas (5GB quota per user)
• /home/cdfsoft - CDF code (read-only)
• Experiment data areas migrated from fcdfsgi2. Check here for a mapping of old to new volume names.

The experiment data areas are mounted on the ILP nodes via autofs. As a result, volumes are not visible until requested. For example, let's say you are interested in looking at something in /cdf/data01/s0.

$ ls -l /cdf/data01
total 0

This can't be right! The map says that /cdf/data01/s0 should be available! Well, you need to call on the mount, s0, for autofs to actually mount the volume.

$ ls -l /cdf/data01/s0
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Jan 11 13:55 lost+found
drwxrwsr-x 14 cdf cdfofrmd 8192 Jan 11 04:00 stream_a
drwxrwsr-x 3 cdf cdfofrmd 4096 Mar 24 2003 stream_j
$ df /cdf/data01/s0
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
fcdfnfs02:/export/data01/s0 338464992 154695008 183769984 46% /cdf/data01/s0


3.2 Startup Files

Your account is created with a standard set of startup files, .login, .cshrc (for C-like shells) and .profile (for Bourne-like shells). These give you a basic environment that will allow you to setup and run the CDF Run II software. If you want to make further customizations then these should be placed in local.login, local.cshrc or local.profile. Examples of things you might want to put in these files can be found

$ setup template_home
$ cd $TEMPLATE_HOME_DIR/dotfiles.localized

Here you will find

• local.cshrc.example
• local.profile.example
• local.login.example
• local.shrc.example

Which you can copy to your area, remove the .example and customize.

3.3 Using Kerberos

A lot of time and effort has been put into the FermiLab Strong Authentication manual, so I refer the reader to it for instructions on using Kerberos in the Fermi computing environment.

Strong Authentication Main Page

The "Getting Started" Guide

3.4 Email

The preferred locations for users to RECEIVE email are the Fermi IMAP servers.

FermiLab Computing Division Email Main Page

See the links "Getting Started" and "Using IMAP".

3.5 Editors

Many editors are available on the ILP nodes. To name a few:

• ed - Not for the faint of heart.
• vi - A simple editor with command and edit modes.
• GNU emacs - A very popular editor with programmers.
• xemacs - The bells and whistles version of emacs. This editor has a tendency to die in annoying ways. It, also, has a habit of ignoring configuration file directives.
• nedit - Yet another pretty editor.