Department of Statistics
Computing Q & A
If you have
questions that are not listed here, please send email to the Webmaster.
Where can I find the system
administrator?
Our system administrator is Dr. Wuyi Liu. He comes to the department every Tuesday and Friday, while he is always accessible through email liu@phys.columbia.edu. His office in our department is room 926. Or you can ask Dood or Anthony where you can find him.
How can I access my email?
When you login to the unix account, you use the "pine" command to access email.
When you access email from your PC, there are a number of email clients you can
choose. Learn more about your options and how to configure them at http://www.columbia.edu/acis/email/pcmail/.
The incoming mail server is: stat.columbia.edu either pop3 or imap, without SSL.
The outgoing mail server is: send.columbia.edu with SSL, with authentication, and the authentication takes your CUNIX id and password.
There is a
tutorial about authenticated smtp
at http://www.columbia.edu/acis/email/authsmtp/
Where
can we find tutorials about basic computing stuff, such as changing password on
Unix, setting Netscape Messenger on my laptop to read
email?
ACIS provide tutorial for them and much more at
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/publications/handouts.html
Can my files on the Unix server be accessed by others?
By default, your mails including your inbox and saved mail folders cannot be accessed
by others. All other files can not be altered by others, but can be seen by others. You
can change file/folder protection mode with the command "chmod".
You can learn how to use it by the command "man chmod".
If you don't want others to read any of your files, put "umask 077" in your startup file,
and run "chmod -R go-rx *" once.
To make your homepage still available to others, run "chmod og+rx public_html" afterwards.
When you use the secure shell client downloaded from www.ssh.com (see below) to upload files from you PC to the Department server, you will also need to configure it to make sure your uploaded files won't be readable by others. To do that, in the SSH Secure Shell client, click Edit -> Settings, look for "File Transfer" part in the left, then click "Advanced" beneath it, then on the right part, change "Default file permissions" to 600, and change "Default directory permissions" to 700. Then click OK. Then click File -> Save Settings.
If this is too
complicated for you to figure out on your own, please ask Wuyi to customize the
folders for you by visiting his office during his hours in our department or
send him an email request.
Telnet and Ftp
Currently stat.columbia.edu forbids telnet and ftp access. This
is due to security reasons. When connecting through telnet or ftp, your
password is transferred in clear text, which will put the whole system at
risk. The replacement is secure shell access (ssh).
If you access from your pc:
You need to download and install windows secure shell client.
Download SSH client from ftp://ftp.ssh.com/pub/ssh/.
The current release version is SSHSecureShellClient-3.2.0.exe. After installation, you will find a secure shell client and
a secure file transfer client on your desktop. They can be taken as the secured
version replacement for telnet and ftp. To login or to do file transfer to
department server, you connect to “stat.columbia.edu” or
“wald.stat.columbia.edu”.
If
you access from another unix
machine:
”ssh
liu@stat.columbia.edu”
is the secure replacement of "telnet stat.columbia.edu"
”sftp liu@stat.columbia.edu
“
is the secure replacement of "ftp stat.columbia.edu"
(note the syntax is slightly different, ie, you need to specify your username on the remote site)
If you access from a pc in the institute you
are visiting:
In case ssh client is not
installed on that pc, you first telnet cunix.cc.columbia.edu to your ACIS
account there, and then use ssh of sftp to access stat.columbia.edu.
The new cunix cluster in the testbed also forbids
telnet. When the switch to the new cunix cluster happens, you might want
to give a gift to your host - install a secure shell client for them!
If you access from Mac OS:
The underlying operation system of Mac OS X is based on BSD Unix, which has
built-in ssh support.
The command line is identical to the unix
commands mentioned above.
Printing
The printers in the department are:
Name Feature Room IP
lwdood0 B&W 1005 SSW 128.59.111.13
colorlp Color 1005 SSW 128.59.111.14
on Unix:
print file a.ps to
lwdood0: lpr -Plwdood0 a.ps
check queue status of lwdood0: lpq
-Plwdood0
if you want to send dvi file
a.dvi directly to the printer lwdood0, put the
following line:
alias dvips '\dvips
-Plwdood0'
in your startup file. (If your login shell is csh or tcsh, your startup file is
~/.cshrc
.
Read http://www.columbia.edu/acis/webdev/unix/index.html if you want to learn more about unix.)
Then you can use the following command to send a.dvi
to the printer lwdood0: dvips a
on Windows:
see http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~liu/print.html
for instruction on setting up printer on your pc.