MCDONALD OBSERVATORY / DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY COMPUTING Index      previous   |   next   Graduate Student PCs Due to a bequest, the Astronomy Department is able to purchase new computers for each of the incoming graduate students. This year we've purchased 20inch iMacs. Data analysis software installed includes IRAF (Interactive Reduction and Analysis Facility) from NOAO, MIDAS from ESO, and SuperMongo. Commercial software includes IDL (Interactive Data Language from Research Systems Inc. TeX/LaTeX and Microsoft Office are the main tools for text processing. Note that the Department retains ownership of these machines. The Computing Services Group will retain root access and will periodically update the machines for security and software patches. However, each user is responsible for what happens on his/her machine, so please report any unauthorized or strange activity. The machines are configured to provide a standard user environment, access to our software libraries, and as much security as possible. Please speak with one of the computing staff before making changes to the operating systems. If you would like a piece of software installed, it is possible there is either a precompiled binary available or that others in the department might require a similar package. Aside from installing system updates from Apple, graduate students should not install or modify science software installations. Please email helpdesk@astro for assistance. Damaging software on your machine will likely result in a rebuild. A 1.4 TB RAID array is available for grad student use, mounted as /san/graduate on the grad student machines. Due to the nature of our RAID system, the array can have one hard drive fail without losing any data. Even with this redundancy, it is remotely possible that a multi-disk failure could cause the array to fail. Currently, the array is not regularly backed up. Please do not keep the only copy of your thesis on the array. This array is not designed to back up large data archives, but is for maintaining a backup of critical files. If you have questions regarding the mass storage arrays, please email helpdesk@astro. Available Documentation There are considerable amounts of online information in the form of the UNIX man pages (/usr/share/man, /usr/dt/man, /opt/local/man, and /opt/local/X11R6/man). Sun's Answerbook and SunSolve online documentation, and in various Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) files in /opt/local/doc. UT Libraries provides access to computer books online. Many O'Reilly books are among the collection at netlibrary.com. (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/books/etext.html#computer) Most of our paper manuals are available for loan from the computing staff. They include operating system manuals, basic books on UNIX, as well as IDL and IRAF manuals. . Please email helpdesk@astro if you are looking for something specific. Index      previous   |   next

4 September 2008 McDonald Observatory · The University of Texas at Austin · Austin, Texas 78712 site comments: www@www.as.utexas.edu