This frequently-asked-questions file contains a list of frequently asked
questions and their frequently given answers. The purpose of such a
frequently asked questions file is to save enquirers the bother of
frequently asking these questions, and respondents the trouble of
frequently answering them. We recommend you read this file. Frequently. :-)
This is very much a work in progress, and has been largely copied from
the FAQ for a different computer system, the CDF system.
A: Account names are composed of the term, the course, and
four letters of the last name of the holder. An example is Joe User,
taking CSC104H has the username h104user.
The first character indicates the term:
To help you find your account name there is an account finder.
A: Your initial password is your student number. You should change it at your first log in. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del simultaneously when you are logged in and choose the "Change Password" button. You will have to enter your current password, then the new password twice (for confirmation). Your new password must be at least six characters long and contain characters from at least three of the following four groups.
Q: If I'm on campus, how do I log in to the CDF-PC machines?
A: Go to the Gernstein Science Library, 9 Kings College Circle (east side). Use the machines in the lab upstair; the ones by the door as you come in belong to the library not us, and you will not be able to use them for coursework. Find a free machine. Read the Student's Guide to CDF-PC (available for a couple of dollars in the University Book Store) for details about logging in.
There are also some machines in the reading room of the J.M. Kelly library 113 St. Joseph St. Located 3 blocks south of Bloor Street, one block north of Wellesley Street, between Bay Street and Queen's Park Crescent. Note that the Reading Room is closed during the summer and therefore these machines are not available if you are taking classes then.
A: There is no direct access from home. CDF-PC does not have dial-up or telnet access. If you have Internet access elsewhere, via UTORdist or a commercial provider, you can read the course web pages, your e-mail, and the newsgroups. Instructors are encouraged to provide assignments, information, etc. on the course web pages. You can also access your files through ftp.
Software cannot be run remotely, nor can assignments be submitted electronically from outside the CDF-PC labs.
REMEMBER that all of the above will require you to have internet access from the machine you are going to use (your home or work machine). CDFPC does NOT provide this access. Your costs of access are your own responsibility. If you pay for connection time, you may wish to connect for as short a duration as possible, eg read mail off-line, etc.
A The labs are open when the Libraries they are in are open. The hours vary depending on the term. A brochure listing library hours is available from the information table of any U of T library. Library hours can also be found at http://www.library.utoronto.ca/www/librarylist.html. CDFPC labs are found in the Reading Room of St. Michael's College Library and the Gerstein Science Information Centre (formerly known as the Sigmund Samuel Library, and still occasionally referred to as such, even elsewhere in this document.)
A: There is a number of ways of reporting problems. In order of prefered mode:
A: Contact your tutor or your course instructor. Do not contact the site administrators. Even if they could help you, they're not allowed to.
A: Workstations are allocated on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you leave a workstation, for any reason, it is available for use by someone else.
If you arrive and cannot find a station ready for log-in, you may use any unoccupied computer. You may wish to check that the user has not simply gone to the printer, but this is just a courtesy. If you cannot close the session by the usual means, you may have to reboot the computer.
Pre "Lock Workstation". IF the site is not busy (i.e. at least 20% of the room's capacity is free), you may use this to retain your machine during a short break (i.e. to use the restrooms), or to retrieve your printout. This is to be used for no more than ten (10) minutes. Remember that other users are entitled to shutdown a computer if it is unattended. The site can become very busy very fast and you should not expect the workstation to still be available upon your return. Save your work before leaving. Abuse of this feature may result in suspension of your account.
A: We have 80 NEC computers. They use 200 Mhz WinChip processors, with 40 MB of RAM. We also have 10 Dell computers, with 333 MHz Pentium II processors and 128 MB of RAM. The Dell machines have 17" (something less viewable) monitors. The OS is MicroSoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and the Network Operating System is SunOS Ver 5.5.1 running on an ultraSPARC 1 with 256 MB of RAM. The fileserver software is Samba Ver 2.x ( http://www.samba.org ).
A: If you have a 3 1/2" IBM PC disk formatted for 720k or 1.44 MB, you can use the disk drive built into every workstation. There are a few machines with the older 5.25 inch drives, if you have this type of disk. There are no utilities for reading disks formatted for the Macintosh or any other OS.
A: From Netscape choose Window | Netscape News.
A: You can use a utility called ghostview. To view the postscript
file in your home directory named "output.ps", launch ghostview
(c:\apps\gstools\gsview\gsview32.exe) and select File | Open and
enter the filename "h:\output.ps".
If a postscript file is downloaded via the CDF-PC web browser, ghostview
will automatically launch.
To print a file without viewing from a DOS prompt type:
net use lpt1: \\sam\lpssam1 (or lpssam2 etc.)
After this you can use:
print filename
This can be shortened to print /D:\\sam\lpssam1 filename
if you only want to print one file.
A: If you deleted the file by dragging it from your home directory to the Recycle Bin, you can open the recycle bin and drag your file back out. Most other deletions are unrecoverable.
An unrecoverable file, particularly an important assignment file that gets accidentally erased shortly before the due date, can be very upsetting. To minimize the possibility, make copies of your important files, copy them onto floppy disk, and keep an eye on your disk quota. When your disk quota fills up, you may not be able to write files successfully, and this sometimes results in lost work.
A: No.
These machines are used by, (primarily), first year students who do not have
computers at home on which to do their coursework. That is the sole purpose
of the lab, not to provide word processing and printing to the student body.
Use the Information Commons facilities at Robarts Library.
A: Read the general CDF rules. There is also the CDF games policy, and a general explanation and rationale. Also, see the Arts & Science (or Engineering) calendar for University policies and codes. Note some of these documents are intended for CDF-PC's "sister" operation in the Engineering Annex. As such, some of the wording may not apply directly, but the spirit of the rules is expected from CDF-PC students.
A: Course accounts for undergraduate courses are deleted shortly after that course's final exam. Course accounts for graduate courses are deleted when the instructor directs. Permanent accounts are deleted when the student leaves the Computer Science programme.
A: Keep using your course accounts for the given courses until the end of the term. We don't want to risk changing your account name during a course, for fear that your assignments and submissions may go astray. In any case, all future courses you enroll in (including courses for the current term for which accounts have not yet been created) will use your permanent account.
Recent printer additions are described in CDFPC Printers.
Q: How do I print a text file?
A: We recommend you use the "PrintFile" utility found in the Tools folder. You can also use an editor such as Notepad, or the File Editor utility found in the Tools folder.
A: You can use a utility called ghostview. To view the postscript file in your home directory named "output.ps", launch the PostScript Viewer utility found in the Tools folder and select File | Open and enter the filename "h:\output.ps". If a postscript file is downloaded via the CDF-PC web browser, ghostview will automatically launch.
To print a file without viewing it, from a DOS prompt type:
net use lpt1: \\sam\printer1 (or printer2 etc.)
Then send your file to the printer using "print filename".
Warning:
it's a good idea to check it first using "ghostview", because if you
didn't get the first line correct, the printing software won't know it's
postscript, and will print it out as text, which is probably not what you
want.
A: Most software provides a printer dialog that includes a drop down list of printers that you can choose from. Click the downward pointing arrow beside the current printer name. If the software you are using doesn't use this convention, it will attempt to print to whatever is defined as your default printer. To check or set which printer is set as default, open the printers folder and right click on the various printers in the folder. The one that is your current default will have a check mark next to "Set as Default". If you want another one to become your default, right click on the printer and then left click on the "Set as Default" line.
A: When someone submits something to be printed, it is refered to as a "print job" or "job". You can view the list (or "queue" (meaning 2)) of all the jobs currently printing or waiting to be printed using the printer icon found in the "Printers" folder on your desktop. The output will look something like this:
Document Name Status Owner Pages Size Submitted Port STDIN Printing f123abcd 12.0KB 12:34:56 PM 12/3/97 STDIN f124user 12.0KB 12:34:57 PM 12/3/97meaning that f123abcd's job is currently printing, and the job belonging to "f124user", is next. Both jobs are 12 kilobytes. To remove your job, right click on the "STDIN" corresponding to your job, and select "cancel" from the menu that pops up. You can also highlight the job(s) and select Document | Cancel from the menu. You can even remove an active job, and it should stop printing. You may want to do this as a courtesy to others if you are printing a big job and many other people are behind you in a hurry. In fact, you shouldn't print big jobs at all when the printer is busy. A big job can be roughly defined as over 1000 KB.
Note that you can also remove other people's jobs, if they are over 1MB (1,000 KB) in size but you shouldn't unless you have a good reason; it will be logged, so you will be caught (and possibly punished) if you do it frivolously. A possible valid reason for removing somebody else's job: all the printers are very busy shortly before an assignment is due, and you can't find the owner of the job. If you do remove it, it would be courteous to e-mail that person (and maybe "admin" too), to tell them you removed their job, and why.
If printing with lpssam1 or lpssam2, choose "Properties" in the printer dialog. Select Duplex (long side) or Duplex (short side).
The Lexmark printers (lpssam1 and lpssam2) can also perform "n-up" printing, i.e. resize n pages of output onto a single piece of paper. After selecting the printer in the printer dialog, press the "Properties" button. From the "Advanced" tab double click "Multipage printing" under the "Document Options" section. Select a suitable value for n, the preview will indicate how the virtual pages will be oriented on the paper. Note that higher values will reduce the size of the type, in general values above 4 will be useful only as overview or thumbnail pages. (Note: some programs bypass the native printer control dialog, and this feature can't be used. Some examples are Acrobat Reader and GhostView.)
A: You can remove another person's print job from the printer queue if it is large (larger than 1MB), if it is taking a very long time to print, and if many others are waiting for printouts. If the job is smaller than 1MB, only the system administrators or the job owner can remove it. Please do not remove other peoples' jobs unless you have a good reason for it. The removal will be logged, and you may be asked to justify why you did it.
If you see from the print queue window that your default printer is busy with a large job, it is a good idea to check another printer to see if it is busy. If it is free, you can print there without having to wait for the large job.
A: If a printer is not working, send mail to admin. If this occurs during working hours, the problem will be fixed as soon as possible. If the printer has been down for a short time, (less than an hour), or has a small number of jobs in the queue it will be brought back on line and the queued jobs will then print. If you use another printer instead, or choose not to wait, you should delete your job from the print queue, otherwise your quota will be reduced when it prints. In addition, if it is an assignment someone else might take your work.
You should note all our printers have multiple trays. Frequently the message panel on a printer will display "Tray X Empty". This is not an indication that the printer is not working, it is due to the fact that one or more of the trays are empty. When the printer has no more paper the message is "Load Paper".
If the printer has been down for a long time or there are a large number of jobs in the queue, the entire queue may be purged. In general this will not be done except in extreme circumstances, particularly if there is still a functional printer available or an assignment is due, so you should not assume that your job will be removed for you.
Sometimes on weekends or after hours, all of the printers will jam, run out of paper, or otherwise go out of service. In this case all jobs from the day(s) before will be purged from the queue, but you may wish to delete your job anyway.
If your software provides a print dialog, there may be a "print to file" option. If this is checked, you will be prompted for a file name when you close the dialog and you can then save the output as a PostScript file for printing later, or to take home and view with ghostscript, if you have it at home.
A: A print quota is a limit on the number of pages you are allowed to print. We have print quotas because laserprinting (especially the "ink", or toner) is expensive, and we can't afford to let everybody print all they want for free, because we'd run out of money. The print quotas are set high enough so that most people will normally be able to do all their printing without running out of pages. For the purpose of quotas, a "page" is what you'd expect: a printed side of a sheet of paper.
When you submit a job to be printed the print server, (a computer/program dedicated to servicing the printers), stores the output that is destined for the printer until the printer is able to process it. This process is "queuing". At this point the server determines if you have sufficient pages left in your quota, and if so, notifies you of how many pages you have left (not counting this job). If not a notification to this effect is sent and your job is discarded. Your quota is not altered at this point.
The queued job is held until it is able to be processed. At this point your quota is once again checked. If you now have insufficent quota remaining (due, perhaps, to jobs that were in the queue when it was origionally submitted) your job will silently be discarded (i.e. no notification is sent). If all is well the server then sychronizes with the printer, begins transmitting your job, then waits for the printer to notify it, (if it printed successfully), that the job has printed and how many pages it used. At this point the number of pages used by that job will be subtracted from your quota. For this reason it is important to delete jobs from the queue if you change your mind.
Incidentally, you may see a "Paused" message in the title bar of the print queue window; the server is paused while it waits, the printer itself is most likely busy processing the job. The timeout on the server is (currently) set for three minutes, after which it will query the printer as to it's status. If the printer replies that it is still working on the job the server will resume waiting, if the job "died" for some reason the server will attempt to move on to the next job. Be aware that it is not unusual for jobs over 1MB to take 10 minutes or more to print.
A: For each course, a number of pages is assigned (usually 300, but possibly less). Course accounts get this number as their print quota. The number is ample for the assigned work for the course. Credit for "spoiled" pages will generally not be given.
A: The "print" command will tell you, each time you print a file.
A: Visit the Undergraduate Student Counsellor's office in SF2304D (Sandford Fleming bldg), or the System Administrator office in EA201 (Engineering Annex bldg) and purchase more pages. The current cost is $2 for every 50 pages, non-refundable. Print quotas are reset at the beginning of each term.
A: First, don't print unless you have to. Take advantage of the workstation's high-resolution screen to preview your document. If you have a computer and printer at home, you can bring your document home, either on a floppy or via email, and print it there. The Lexmark printers (lpssam1 and lpssam2) can perform "n-up" printing, i.e. resize n pages of output onto a single piece of paper. After selecting the printer in the printer dialog, press the "Properties" button. From the "Advanced" tab double click "Multipage printing" under the "Document Options" section. Select a suitable value for n, the preview will indicate how the virtual pages will be oriented on the paper. Note that higher values will reduce the size of the type, in general values above 4 will be useful only as overview or thumbnail pages. (Note: some programs bypass the native printer control dialog, and this feature can't be used. Some examples are Acrobat Reader and GhostView.)
A: A disk quota is a limit on the amount of hard disk space your files are permitted to occupy. We have only a limited amount of hard disk space, and disk quotas help to ensure that everybody gets their fair share.
Disk quotas are measured in 1KB blocks.
A: Each course account has a fixed disk quota. Permanent accounts have a disk quota equal to one course. This can be increased on request if enrolled in more than one course that uses CDF.
A: Open the "My Computer" folder by double clicking the icon on your desktop. Right click on the h: icon and select properties from the menu. You will see a pie chart depicting your disk usage.
A: Erase all the files you don't need, or copy them onto floppy disk. Use "zip" to make your files take up less room. Erase files that you can recreate from source code (eg. files of the form *.exe, *.class, etc.).
A: Your first clue something is wrong might be errors about being unable to load profile settings, or you'll be unable to save work from an editor, or run a program you're writing. Don't panic and don't exit your editor without saving. Minimize it if necessary and check your remaining free space as described above.
If your free space is low, you should delete files or move them to floppy disks. Most likely you know what is taking up space, eg those mp3 files you downloaded or the ICQ client you installed.
There are some hidden places to look, if you can't find what's taking up space.
Saved mail also occupies space. You should delete unwanted mail. If you have used another program (eg netscape) to read mail you should remember to check it also. You should also check where attachments are stored (eg H:\.eudora\attach\), images etc that have been mailed to you can occupy considerable space.
Another place to look is where your Desktop is saved between login sessions, H:\.NTProfile\Desktop\ -- note this isn't your current Desktop, i.e. the one in use by your current login session. It might contain files you do not see on your Desktop, if you received messages about a new profile being created when you logged in.
When you have freed up enough space, you can return to your editor and save your work.
A: Electronic mail is a message-transmission service which allows electronic messages to be transmitted from one person to another. When a message arives for somebody, it is placed in the person's mailbox.
The "mail" command can be used to both read and send mail. To send mail, you need to know the person's address. This is usually of the form "loginname@machinename.domain". For example, to mail to "Jane Doe" who has the login name "jdoe" on the machine "geronimo" in the domain "uwaterloo.ca", use the address "jdoe@geronimo.uwaterloo.ca".
At CDFPC, our default domain name is "toronto.edu", and our machine name (for purposes of mail) is "cdfpc". We have an alternative domain name, "utoronto.ca", which can also be used. If the machine and/or domain name is skipped, then the defaults are used.
A: Your email address at CDFPC is "loginname@cdfpc.toronto.edu", where "loginname" is your login name. "loginname@cdfpc.utoronto.ca" will also work.
A: If you know what their login name, machine name, and domain is, then try "loginname@machine.domain". If you don't know their login name, but you do know the machine and domain name, you can try "finger name@machine.domain" from a command prompt. But the best and most sure way is always to ask them. There's not usually an easy way to automatically find out the email address of eg. "my friend Kim at Harvard".
A: If you have an account elsewhere you may wish to forward mail that is addressed to your cdfpc account to the other system. This can be accomplished by creating a file named ".forward" in your home directory, and listing the e-mail address of the destination you wish mail forwarded to in that file. The file should contain just one line and the email address must be correct. For example it might look like this:
john.doe@utoronto.ca
Tip: Windows won't let you directly create a filename that begins with a dot ("."), which is required for forwarding. From whatever editor you are using, enclose the filename in quotes (i.e. ".forward" including the quotes) when you save the file. This works for at least the File Editor found in the Tools folder, and in Notepad. Also, the file must be an ASCII text file, so don't use WordPad to create it.
Note: Don't forward your other account back to your cdfpc account, or you will create a mail loop, with unpleasant consequences.
A: It occasionally happens that mail says:
WARNING: You are already reading mail.when you start it up (or words to that effect). There will also be some options available to you. The mail program creates a special file called when it is running. If the mail program terminates abnormally (for example, if you are running the mail program on another machine, or if it somehow crashed), it won't remove that file, and the next time you run mail, it will think that there's another mail program running, and give you this message. Select one of the options presented to you.
In other cases your mail quota has been exceeded. Each user has a limit on the size of incoming mail. The limit is extremely large in comparison to most text messages, so users will not normally experience any problem. However attachments to mail messages are often quite large, and can cause quota problems. Attachments are any binary file that the sender has chosen to include with the message, (eg. word-processor documents, images, even programs are sometimes sent). The message received in this case is along the lines of "Unable to copy mail spool file to temp pop dropbox /usr/mail/.user.pop". The error occurs after you have entered your password. You will still be able to send mail and read previously received mail, but you will not be able to read your new mail. In this case you will have to contact the administrators. As mentioned, you should be able to send mail. If not you will have to phone. Most likely your incoming mail will be lost. People who send mail when your mailbox is full may or may not be notified that their mail was undelivered.
Note that if you subscribe to mailing lists, or read mail from home and have "leave mail on server" checked, it may be possible for your mailbox to exceed the quota without having been sent an attachment, but 1 MB is a lot of text.
A: "News" is an information service very much like a collection of bulletin boards. The news services is divided into "newsgroups" by topic. Each newsgroup contains a number of messages posted by people on this topic. New messages appear as they are posted, and old ones are erased to make room for new ones. A huge number of computers around the world support News, and these periodically exchange new messages among themselves.
At CDFPC, we have newsgroups for every course (for example, the newsgroup for the course csc123h would be "ut.cdf.csc123h"). Other CDFPC-specific newsgroups worth noting are ut.cdf.pc.announce, for announcements of general interest to all CDFPC students (this means you!), ut.cdf.pc.general, for topics related to CDFPC itself, and ut.cdf.general, for other student-related topics. There is also a test newsgroup, ut.cdf.test for "just testing" postings. Don't post "just testing" postings to any other newsgroup.
You can read news by using Netscape.
There exist search engines to search the entire USENET heirarchy going back for some period of time. See, for example, DejaNews or AltaVista.
A: If you want to post a message to a newsgroup, you can post from the news reader software in the lab. Use the "Reply" or "New Msg" button. Posting directly is permitted only from machines in the labs.
You can also mail the message to "newsgroup@cdfpc.toronto.edu" (newsgroup being the name of the newsgroup). For example, to post to ut.cdf.test, you can mail your posting to ut.cdf.test@cdfpc.toronto.edu. This works from the lab and also from locations where direct posting is not permitted, eg from home.
A: All the comp groups (about computers), the can groups (about Canada), the ont groups (about Ontario), the tor groups (about Toronto), the ut groups (about the University of Toronto), the soc.college groups (about Colleges and Universities), the news.announce groups (about news), and the misc.jobs groups (about jobs and employment) are offered on CDFPC. Miscellanous other newsgroups relevant to CDFPC are also offered.
Note that most of certain other groups (eg. alt (alternative), rec (recreational activities), talk (debates and arguments), soc (things of interest to society in general), sci (science), etc.) are not available on CDFPC.
As a general rule of thumb, groups of possible benefit to a computer science education in Canada are offered, and others are not. Think of it this way: if the newsgroup was a journal, would the Computer Science Library carry it?
Why do we have a policy like this?
There are many useful things that can be done with computers like ours. In a general-purpose computing facility, most of these would probably be fair game. But CDFPC is NOT a general-purpose computing facility. We are a "Computing Disciplines" Facility. This means we use our computers to teach "Computing Disciplines", in particular, computer science and related courses.
We tolerate a certain amount of fuzziness in this: we don't want to be too rigid. But we certainly don't think it's our business to carry a news service that has no relation to what we do, merely because it happens to be propagated by computer, rather than by newsprint.
A: Your newsreader probably has a method to navigate through all articles regardless of whether you've read them. In Netscape, use Options | Show all messages.
A: Electronic Mail is available, world-wide. Other network services, like file transfer (ftp or rcp), remote login (rlogin or telnet), remote typing conversation (talk), etc. may or may not be available to sites outside the University of Toronto.
A: Firstly, respect other people's machines. The fact that a machine is accessible over the network does not give you permission to use it. Attempts to access other computers without authorization (by circumventing password protection, for example) is an offence, and can result in the loss of your CDFPC account or even academic or legal sanctions.
Secondly, respect other people's use of the network. Don't overload a network with lots of traffic. Don't use services that require lots of network bandwidth, except in off periods. Don't send large or many files via e-mail unless you know that the network bandwidth between you and your destination site is sufficient.
Finally, don't set up any network servers of your own without consulting the CDFPC administrators.
A: You can access UTLink (the UofT Library information retrieval system) as follows: Type "telnet library.utoronto.ca" and log in as "utlink" Some information on using UTLink is available at your nearest U of T library. You can use your favourite web browser (eg. netscape) to access http://www.library.utoronto.ca.
A: Your "Roaming Profile" permits you to customize your environment and have the changes preserved and used on different computers. Most of the things you can change are set via the Control Panel (Start => Settings => Control Panel ). The computer might not be able to save your current settings if the server is unavailable, or in certain other situations. Usually this error does not indicate a serious problem. Close the dialog to allow your logout to proceed, and log in on a different computer to confirm that you can log in without incident. Contact the system administrators if there is a problem with the second login.
A: If you have files on your desktop that are larger than your remaining disk quota, they will be lost when you log out. You should always save to your home directory (h:), not the desktop. The desktop workspace gets saved at logout, permitting you to temporarily work with files in excess of your quota. You must remember to delete the file(s) before you log out. If you do exceed your quota, see the question in this faq for additional details.