University of California at Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Instructional & Electronics Support Group /share/b/pub/ntu.help /share/b/pub/calview.help Jan 19 2007 CONTENTS: The NTU Program at UCB Instructor Account, Email List and WEB Site User Accounts for NTU Classes Newsgroups for NTU Classes Software for NTU Classes Troubleshooting The NTU Program at UCB ---------------------- Several EECS courses are offered through the National Technical University (NTU, http://www.ntu.edu/) via CalVIEW (http://coe.berkeley.edu/calview/). EECS Instruction provides computing resources for the students. The students attend the classes from their distant work or home locations by viewing the lectures on video, teleconferencing with the course consultants and logging into the EECS Instructional computers to run CAD tools and other required software applications. NTU students are mostly expected to seek help about the computing resources from their CalVIEW course consultants, who communicate directly with the EECS Instructional Support staff. The contacts at EECS Instructional computing are inst@eecs.berkeley.edu, kevinm@eecs.berkeley.edu, 378 Cory, 510-543-6141. Instructor Account, Email List and WEB Site ------------------------------------------- EECS Instruction provides a UNIX account for the NTU instructor to store course-related files including WEB pages and email lists. The consultants should contact inst@eecs to request access to the instructor account. The instructor account names are typically "n" followed by the UCB course number, ie n140, n141, n142, n224, n231, n240, n241, n245, n252. We'll give you a password to that account, or you can send us an SSH public key so you can login using your personal SSH password. To change the UNIX password, log into "update.cs.berkeley.edu" and type "passwd". Then you can login using ssh to any one of the Instructional UNIX computers (for a complete list of computers, see http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/clients). You can download ssh from http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html#ssh. The related WEB site is, for example http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~n140 . The files themselves are in the instructor directory under "public_html". There are a couple of ways to update the WEB pages on our server: 1) You can login in directly to the UNIX account (on cory.eecs or etc) and use a UNIX editor (vi or emacs). 2) You can edit the files on your local system and use "scp", "sftp" or SSH Secure File Transfer to copy them into the public_html dir in the UNIX account. Additional instructions about generating an SSH key and managing an instructor WEB site are under http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/setup.html#class_page Email to the instructor account (ie "n140@imail.eecs.berkeley.edu") can be forwarded to the course consultants if we list the consultants' email addresses in the ".forward" file in the instructor home directory. Instructors can create a mailing list for the students by adding their email addresses to the file named (for example) "n140-class", one address per line. Our mail server looks for that file in the top directory of the instructor account. The email address to send mail to that list is n140-class@imail.eecs.berkeley.edu There are also newsgroups for the NTU versions of EECS classes. See "Newsgroups for NTU Classes" below. The main servers for the Instructional accounts are WEB: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu Email/IMAP: imail.eecs.berkeley.edu UNIX home dirs: mamba.cs.berkeley.edu (\\mamba) User Accounts for NTU Classes ----------------------------- EECS Instruction will provide UNIX computer accounts for NTU students when requested by the course consultant. We need to know how many students are enrolled so we can create a batch of accounts. We give the consultants the logins and passwords, and the consultants distribute them to the students. These accounts expire at the end of the UC Berkeley semester. The consultants should send inst@eecs.berkeley.edu a list of the email addresses of each student and the acccount that was issued, so we can contact the user if there are any problems with the account. The students should be familiar with the rules of usage that are displayed when they login and in /share/b/pub/class-account-form.pdf. They can find information about connecting over the network in http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html That includes information about downloading SSH for free. SSH is required for logging into our UNIX systems with secure password encryption. Students can use those accounts for email if they wish. They can login to our IMAP server (imail.eecs.berkeley.edu) or use UNIX "mailx" and "pine" commands locally when logged into cory.eecs, c199.eecs, etc. Information about that is under http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html#email. Newsgroups for NTU Classes -------------------------- UC Berkeley provides newsgroups for NTU classes. Newsgroups are a useful forum because users can post text articles and attachments (like email) and the information can be read and copied by anyone in the group (and possibly anyone in the world). The articles remain on the news server until the end of the current semester. The NTU articles are not archived before they are deleted. Rules of Usage: All users of UC Berkeley computers must comply with the the Rules of Conduct that are summarized in http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/share/b/pub/html/etiquette.html Rules specific to the UC Berkeley class newsgroups include - postings should be related only to the course for which the newsgroup is intended - postings must not be used to advertise commercial products or services How to Acccess Newsgroups: NTU students can only access these newsgroups by logging into our WebNews proxy site at http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/webnews/. They use their EECS Instructional username and password for that. WebNews is a simple, non- threaded utility for reading and posting articles to news.berkeley.edu. Direct access to the UC Berkeley news server from off-campus requires a UC Berkeley student or employee ID number, so NTU students must use our on-campus proxy. The current NTU newsgroups: ucb.ntu.n130 ucb.ntu.n140 ucb.ntu.n141 ucb.ntu.n142 ucb.ntu.n225c ucb.ntu.n231 ucb.ntu.n240 ucb.ntu.n241 ucb.ntu.n242 ucb.ntu.n247 ucb.ntu.n252 Please subscribe to the newsgroup called "news.announce.newusers" to learn more about the world-wide USENET news service. Software for NTU Classes ------------------------ Instructions for accessing software on the Instructional UNIX systems are on-line via the links on http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/software. We generally recommend that the students 'ssh' into c199.eecs.berkeley.edu, which is a powerful Sun SPARC login server. A sample SSH command from a UNIX computer would be ssh c199.eecs.berkeley.edu -l n240-aa These are software products that are typically used: HSPICE: HSPICE is commercial and licensed to run on our systems. It has a graphical XWindows interface, so users will need to be running an XWindows server on their local workstaion. For instructions, students should see http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/pub.cgi?file=spice.help http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html#xwindows SUPREM: We have TSUPREM-4 and SSUPREM3. TSUPREM-4 is available through a password-protected WEB site. SSUPREM3 requires an XWindows server. For instructions, students should see http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/pub.cgi?file=tcad.help http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html#xwindows MATLAB: MATLAB is commercial and licensed to run on our systems. It has a graphical XWindows interface, so users will need to be running an XWindows server on their local workstation. For instructions, students should see http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/pub.cgi?file=matlab.help http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html#xwindows XWindows server: UNIX workstations have this by default. MS Windows systems can run Exceed. Exceed is a commercial product that UC Berkeley cannot give to NTU students, so the students may have to purchase it. See "Exceed" under http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/software for details. Troubleshooting --------------- The basic steps for running software from UNIX to a Windows desktop are: 1) Install SSH if needed from http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/download-ssh.html 2) Install Exceed if needed - it's not available from UCB. 3) Start "Exceed" (not "Xsession" or "Xstart") 4) Start SSH with 'X tunneling' and login to "c199.eecs.berkeley.edu". 5) Type "xterm"; if a window pops up, the XWindow connection is working. 6) If "xterm" gives an error message, see Troubleshooting at http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html#xwindows 7) Type "hspice" and wait for that window. Some common problems that the NTU students have had: 1) Trying to use 'telnet' or the Exceed 'xstart' or 'xsession' commands to login. This fails because SSH (on port 22) is the only login protocol that we allow. SSH can be downloaded for free from http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html. 2) SSH fails. Some industry sites have firewalls that block port 22. The student would have to talk with the company network administrator about resolving that. 3) Can't get Exceed for free. UCB cannot give it to NTU users. This should be resolved early in the semester to avoid lost time. The Exceed XWindow manager is one way to run XWindows-based programs on our UNIX servers that will pop up graphical windows on your local desktop. Programs such as HSPICE, MATLAB and SSUPREM3 use XWindows. See http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/pub.cgi?file=exceed.help for alternatives. EECS Instructional Support Group 384/386 Cory, 333 Soda inst@eecs.berkeley.edu