Brandeis Computer Science Systems Operations

The Brandeis Computer Science Systems Office is staffed by Christopher Allison (chris at cs dot brandeis dot edu) and his student assistants, known as Gurus ( guru at cs dot brandeis dot edu).

Announcements

2008-05-18, 03:30 AM, EDT: All Service complete, all NFS clients appear to be behaving normally. Please report any problems to guru
2008-05-12: Please note that there will be an NFS Service Outage from this Saturday, May 17 2008, 22:00 to this Sunday, May 18 2008, 06:00.

For more information, or for updates before, during, and after the outage please check /etc/motd on public shell servers, or visit http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/nfs_status.txt
2008-05-04: Today's mail service maintenance was completed successfully and within the scheduled outage maintenance window. All mail services have been restored, and no mail should have been lost. Please feel free to contact guru with any questions, comments or concerns you may have. Thank you for your patience,

- CS Systems Operations
There will be a service outage to perform scheduled maintenance on the CS Dept. mail server ({imap,mail,mailhost,pop,smtp}.cs.brandeis.edu) this coming Sunday (May 4, 2008) from 13:00-14:00 (1:00-2:00 PM) EDT.

During the outage you will be unable to check for new mail, or send mail via the CS mail server. Under no circumstances should any mail be lost or otherwise not reach its intended recipient because of this outage.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact guru@cs.brandeis.edu. If you believe that the outage will prove an undue hardship for you at its currently scheduled time, please contact guru, and we will work with you to remedy the problem.

For information updates during the outage and after, you may check /etc/motd on all public shell servers, and guru's website (http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~guru/).
We are aware of an uptick in "backscattered" spam which is being bounced back to older accounts at retired or legacy machines (which failover to @cs inboxes). Such messages are not a sign that your account has been hacked or otherwise compromised, as most of the "senders" we have seen are forged to addresses at machines that are no longer online.

Unfortunately, there is little that we can do about such messages, as they represent a failure in the spam identification systems of the remote sites that initially received the spam, which are now bouncing it back to us, and not in our own spam identification infrastructure. (We see such messages not as spam, but as legitimate emails from remote mail servers - which they are - unfortunately they are emails which the remote servers should know better than to send.)

However, should you receive an unmanageable number of such messages, please feel free to alert guru, both to help us in tracking the shape and scope of the phenomenon, and so that we might see about assisting you on a case-by-cases basis at this time. Thank you,

- CS Systems Operations,
2008-04-13
2007-10-23: Starting at 12:00 Noon (EDT) today, all mail scored >= 15 by SpamAssassin will be silently dropped. Neither the alleged sender or the final recipient will be notified of this action. A copy of all dropped messages will be kept in quarantine for a minimum of 14 days. Mail scoring >= 5 is considered to be spam.

This decision was made on Wednesday, October 17th, in consultation with the Systems Policy Advisory Committee after 22 months of spam scoring (but no default filtering) showed SpamAssassin to be reliable and reasonably configured, with the occasional false positive never scoring > 10.

Questions or concerns about this new policy should be directed to guru@cs.brandeis.edu. For more information on how we scan mail, and how you can implement personal filters, see the Mail Settings page.
2007-09-19: Use of 129.64.3.3 as a client-side DNS resolver is deprecated. The machine running at 129.64.3.3 was replaced yesterday with a new machine running different software which answers authoritative queries only. Attempts to make recursive ("client-side") queries against this machine/ip address will fail. You can check your client's DNS servers on Linux and OS X by looking in the file /etc/resolv.conf. To change your DNS servers on Linux, modify /etc/resolv.conf, or use your distribution's GUI toolset. To change your DNS servers on Mac OS X, modifying this listing in the text field located at: System Preferences > Network > <Your Active interface> (eg: "Built-In Ethernet" or "Airport") > TCP/IP > DNS Servers:. All managed clients should already be properly configured.
Due to popular demand we have added a section to the Mail Settings page describing how to perform server-side sorting upon delivery of messages suspected (by the server) to be spam, using procmail. See the section titled "Dealing with spam using procmail," and please note that procmail is a very powerful tool that lets you permanently delete mail with great ease, so ask for help if, after reading the instructions, you are not sure how to use it.
2007-08-13: All Berry Patch RHEL workstation/shell servers have been upgraded to RHEL 5. Please mail guru to ask for assistance, report bugs, and request software or configuration changes.
Any bugs on the patch machines, big or small, should be reported to guru at cs dot brandeis dot edu
We have been working to integrate the berry patch Macintoshes into the department authentication framework. At this time, the assimilation is complete, and all patch machines should be identically configured. To use these machines, log in with your CS username and password at the gui or via ssh. The Macs mount home directories and /common, and have pine installed for reading email, XCode Tools (gcc, java tools, etc) for compiling your code, and most other common Unix utilities you should be accustomed to from linux (ssh, vim, emacs, and so on). If you experience any problems with these systems, or would like to request the install of any software not already present (for academic use only) please email guru.
One might have assumed this didn't need to be said but: We will take disciplinary action against any students caught hacking our machines.
If you are having trouble with java, you probably need to look at the Java notes
Have an account? Need a computer? Try the List of Public Workstations
Please note that there have been changes in mail settings. If your account was created *before* October 2004, and you have not already done so, you must perform the changes required in mail settings to get your email to work. All accounts created after October 2004 are already properly configured.
You must ssh into password.cs.brandeis.edu in order to change your password.
Interested in version control and change tracking for your projects? Try setting up a SVN Repository in your own homedirectory. Also check out the SVN Book for other helpful documentation (or just use good old 'man' and 'info'). There is also an older how-to if you wish to use CVS.

Here are our previously compiled FAQS. This is a good place to start if you have any questions. For information on how to use the printers in the patch go here. All users are encouraged to consult the Usage Policy if they have questions about suitable usage of Department resources.

You may use SSH (Secure SHell) to log into the CS systems remotely. Telnet has long been disabled. We suggest OpenSSH, which is a part of the base install of most Unix-like operating systems, including all standard linux distributions, and Mac OS X. ('man ssh' at a shell prompt for usage instructions) Alternatives include PuTTY or the SSH extension for TeraTerm for Windows, and MacSSH for Mac OS Classic systems. Consult OpenSSH.com for a more comprehensive list of other options and alternatives.

If you are looking for help using a unix-like operating system, which is what all of the machines in the cluster are running, then take a look at our Unix help pages.

Brandeis University Computer Science

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