WELCOME BACK! While you were (hopefully) enjoying your vacation, we have been busy making changes. Read on to find out what's new.
Don't have your own computer? Looking for a place to work on your paper after the library closes? Want to use computers and hang out with your friends at the same time? Want to use a printer late at night? Tired of being kicked out of Fisher because a class is using the room? If so, this semester should be better than the last.
That's right: there is again a dedicated computer lab on campus. The new computer lab is located just off of the game room in the student union (where the radio station used to be). The computer lab will be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The computer lab currently has six computers, a networked printer, and one external USB floppy drive. Three of the computers are new iMacs with MacOS 9, and the other three are PCs running Windows 2000. Software in the computer lab includes word processing programs, web browsers, telnet, SSH, and FTP clients, Maple (a numerical analysis program), and SPSS (a statistics package). More software for classes and additional machines may be added to the lab if needed.
To use the computers, log in as user "lab" with no password. To print to the printer from a mac, select "Computer Lab LaserJet 4050"; from Windows print to "Complab".
If you notice any problems with the lab, if there is software you would like installed, or if you have any other suggestions about the computer lab, please let us know. Faculty who need software installed in the Fisher lab for their classes, should also let us know as soon as possible so we can accomodate. You can send email to ca@simons-rock.edu or just stop by Computer & Media Services, located in the basement of the College Center.
Happy computing!
Computer Assistants are students employed by Computer & Media Services to take care of student computer problems. If you need help with a computer problem or have a computer question, get in touch with a C.A.
The C.A.s can be reached at any time by sending email to ca@simons-rock.edu. You can also call the C.A. beeper from 8 PM until midnight Sunday through Thursday at 1-800-512-5152. When you call the C.A. beeper, leave your phone extension and wait by the phone for a C.A. to call you back.
We are looking to extend our C.A. beeper hours and have additional office hours during the day. If you are fairly knowledgeable about computers and want to help others, please send email to action@simons-rock.edu.
Sometimes web pages may not load as quickly as you would like. One thing you can do to make them load faster is to configure your web browser to use our proxy server. A proxy server is a server that keeps local copies of accessed web pages. By using the proxy server, your computer will not need to connect to off-campus servers to receive web pages which have already been read by another user of the proxy server.
To use a proxy server you must edit the proxy settings for your web browser. The exact location of this option is specific to your browser. For example, in Netscape Communicator 4.7 for MacOS, the proxy settings are located under Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Proxies. In Internet Explorer 5 for Windows 2000, the proxy settings can be found under Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings.
Our http proxy server is located at proxy.simons-rock.edu, port 3128. This is what you should enter in your proxy settings. You may also wish to exclude the domain simons-rock.edu from access through the proxy.
Do you want to know what is going on next week? Are you planning an event and want to get the word out? Check out the online calendar at www.simons-rock.edu/calendar/.
For help using the calendar, read the extensive help on the web page. You can view the events for a single day or an entire month, or you can search for a specific category of events. You can also contribute to the calendar by logging in securely and entering your minerva username and password. (If you don't know your username or password, stop by Computer & Media Services in the basement of the College Center.) After you are logged in, select "Submit" and enter a title for your event, a description, time, location, and other information. After your submissions is approved, it will appear on the web page. That's all there is to it!
As you may remember, we upgraded our network uplink from a partial T1 to two T1's (roughly 3 Mbps) at the beginning of last semester. This upgrade tremendously helped to improve our network throughput to off-campus.
Still, bandwidth, like most other things, is a limited commodity. Even with this upgrade, we are still sometimes pushing our network capacity. Our bandwidth is also a shared resource. The actions of a few people can make the network almost unusable for everybody else. Please be considerate of others and use the network responsibly.
In order to make the network more usable, we have considered many different means of reducing network traffic. For the past year we have had a 200 MB (megabyte) limit on the amount of data that can be transferred to or from off-campus machines in a day. Any machine that transfers 200 MB in one day is blocked from off-campus access until the following morning.
Exceptions to this limit may be granted upon request. Additionally, there is a free period every night during which time data transferred is not counted toward the 200 MB total. Currently this period is from midnight to 7 AM, though this is subject to change depending on the demands on resources during this time.
You can find out how much you have uploaded or downloaded in a day or how many times you have been blocked this semester by going to http://guardian.simons-rock.edu:8080/.
There is now a mailing list, announce@simons-rock.edu, that you can subscribe to in order to get announcements. You can subscribe to announce by sending an email to announce-subscribe@simons-rock.edu. This will send you an email asking for confirmation of your subscription.
Announcements should be sent to announce, not to all@simons-rock.edu. Except for in rare circumstances, we strongly discourage sending emails to all students, faculty, and/or staff. Instead, such messages will only be sent to members of announce. If you would not like to receive any announcements, simply don't subscribe.
As announce is just for announcements, there is another mailing list, misc@simons-rock.edu, for discussions. To subscribe to misc, send email to misc-subscribe@simons-rock.edu.
In addition to using announce and misc, you can create and maintain your own mailing lists with the help of a program called ezmlm. Mailing list creation is done by telnetting or SSHing to mail.simons-rock.edu. (To do so you need a client such as NiftyTelnet SSH, TeraTerm Pro, or Windows telnet.)
Once you are connected to mail.simons-rock.edu (also known as durandal), log in with your email username and password. You can type "help" at the prompt for help. For help with mailing lists, type "help list". For help creating mailing lists, type "help list-create". To create the mailing list "penguin" type "list create penguin". All mailing list addresses are prefixed with your username. The address of the penguin list would be user-penguin@simons-rock.edu, where user is your username.
Once created, people can subscribe to your mailing list by emailing user-listname-subscribe@simons-rock.edu, where listname is the name of your list. You can choose to make your mailing list moderated so that you must approve messages before they can be sent. You also have the option of restricting your list so that only subscribers can send email to the list.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? To respond to any of the articles in this newsletter, send email to underground@simons-rock.edu.