Advanced OS class environment

All of the tools necessary to complete the lab assignments in this class have been built and installed for use on the vine Sweet hall machines. If you prefer to do the lab work on your own machine, you may want to refer to the tools page for information on how to set up the development environment.

Accessing the class development environment

To use the class tools on the vine Sweet hall machines, you need to add the directory /afs/ir.stanford.edu/class/cs240c/bin to your path. If you are using csh or tcsh, you can run the following command on vine.stanford.edu to set up your account for the class:

vine8:~> source /afs/ir.stanford.edu/class/cs240c/env/dot.cshrc.init
Adding cs240c environment to your .cshrc file...
Setting up the cs240c environment...
vine8:~> 

Logging into the Sweet hall machines from Unix workstations

You can log into the Sweet hall machines from any Unix workstation using the ssh command. For example, if your username is ``student'', you can run the command:
% ssh vine.stanford.edu -l student
Password: 
Last login: Mon Jan 15 18:39:16 2001 from orchard.scs.cs.n
...
vine8:~> 
If you are using X-windows, ssh can forward connections to your X-server. If your ssh is not configured to do this by default, use the -Y flag. For older versions of ssh, you will need to use the -X (capital X) flag. When X is forwarded, your DISPLAY environment variable should be automatically set.
% ssh -Y vine.stanford.edu -l student
Password: 
Last login: Mon Jan 15 18:39:16 2001 from orchard.scs.cs.n
...
vine8:~> echo $DISPLAY
localhost:11.0
vine8:~> 

Logging into the Sweet hall machines from Windows

It is probably easiest to work from a Unix workstation, but you can also access the servers using Windows SSH clients. If you don't have an SSH client, there are several free software packages you can install:

Logging into the Sweet hall machines from MacOS

New versions of MacOS may already come with SSH. If not, Nifty Telnet SSH is a free SSH client for MacOS. It has a good reputation, but the author of this web page has not used it. You need Stuffit Expander to install Nifty Telnet SSH.

Note: some versions of MacOS X apparently set the DISPLAY environment variable to the value 0:0, which confuses the ssh client. If this is the case, you will need to change the DISPLAY to :0 before running ssh. Do so with the command export DISPLAY=:0 for sh/bash or setenv DISPLAY :0 for csh/tcsh.

Copying files to and from the Sweet hall machines

You can copy files to and from the Sweet hall machines using the scp program which comes with ssh. If plain scp does not work, try using the -1 flag which uses version 1 of the ssh protocol. For example, to copy the file testfile to the work/ subdirectory of your home directory on the Sweet hall machines, you can run the following:

% scp -1 testfile student@vine.stanford.edu:work/
scp: warning: Executing scp1 compatibility.
Host key not found from the list of known hosts.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Host 'vine.stanford.edu' added to the list of known hosts.
Password: 
testfile                  |          1 KB |   1.0 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%
%                                                               

Newer versions of SSH also come with a utility called sftp, which acts like the ftp file transfer utility. Some people may prefer this interface.

Finding a lightly loaded machine

If everyone uses the same machine to compile, things will get quite slow. However, by specifing the generic machine name, such as vine.stanford.edu, you will automatically get a lightly-loaded machine.

Using the X-windows system from Windows or MacOS

Since your assignments will mostly be in the Unix environment, you may find it convenient to run the X-windows system to have multiple unix windows open on various machines. You have two options for running X-windows.