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