Things every NCAC computer user should know

Do not EVER throw out U.S. Government property. Check every item for a U.S. Government sticker, and if it's never going to be used again return it to the FHWA Contract Manager.

You are bound by the Computing Policies of The George Washington University.

Account management

  1. How to change your password
    We use Kerberos for authentication. From any of the sgi workstations use the command kpasswd to change your Kerberos password.

    E-mail passwords and account passwords on Lou are not in Kerberos. On Lou use the command passwd to change your login password. Only NCAC faculty, staff and students have passwords on their accounts on Lou, all other access is with the public-key authentication method in SSH.

  2. How to change your e-mail password
    Under settings in the webmail interface you'll find an option to change your password. The e-mail password is not synchronized with the Kerberos or Lou passwords.

  3. The NCAC mailing list
    You can subscribe or unsubscribe yourself. See the ncac list instructions.

  4. Editing your web page
    Read the user guide.

Networks

  1. Peer-to-peer file sharing
    Downloads of material protected by federal copyright or intellectual property laws is prohibited.

  2. How to find the MAC Address
    This various on systems; but you are likely asking because you use Windows.

    Windows XP: right click the network interface, go to status, Details...

    3. MacOS X: Lucky you! You don't need the MAC Address. You will use your computer's name in the DHCP Client ID field. This field is case sensitive.

  3. Network Licensing with FLEXlm
    Our FLEXlm license manager is available to hosts within the NCAC network. Set the environment variable LM_LICENSE_FILE to 1700@origin.ncac.gwu.edu. Contact me if you need license access outside the NCAC network.

Shell

  1. PATH
    In addition to the system path, NCAC users were given the additional in their .zshenv file: 
    path=( $path /usr/pbs/bin /opt/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/freeware/bin ${HOME}/bin.${MACHTYPE} )
    If you cannot run some program, it is likely because /opt/bin and /usr/local/bin are not in your path.

Email

  1. How to setup an Mail client
    Use the IMAP server mail.ncac.gwu.edu and the SMTP server mail.ncac.gwu.edu port 587. Use authenticated relaying and SSL/TLS. Optionally, enhance security by using MD5 Challenge-Response authentication or Kerberos authentication.

Filesystems

  1. Unix permissions
    Use chmod.

    To change the permission of all files under the directory project 

    find project -type f -exec chmod ug=r {} \;
    To change the permission of all directories under the directory project 
    find project -type d -exec chmod ug=rx {} \;