Using the LCS Web/DB Computing Facility

Overview

This document provides some basic information about accessing and using the development machines which belong to the LCS Web/DB Computing Facility.

Finding your server and logging in

Each of you should have been assigned a student number (like std1, std12, std29). The names of the machines in the facility are lcsweb1.lcs.mit.edu, lcsweb2.lcs.mit.edu... , linuxp1.lcs.mit.edu, linuxp2.lcs.mit.edu... These are the machines you should log into for running emacs and for administering your Web server: use the machine name indicated when you were assigned your student number. Do not run Web browsers from these machines; instead, use the local machine that you're using to log into the facility. Also, do not run multiple copies of emacs; instead, use the emacs' windowing capabilities which are described in this introduction to Emacs.

There are two user directories you should be concerned with on your machine:

The first is your home directory: /home/std<yournumber>. Actually, you probably won't be using this very much at all, except for Unix initialization files and work that you store.
The second is your public Web directory: /web/std<yournumber>. This has two subdirectories you should be concerned with:
- www: These are the publicly visible files served by your server. The public name of your Web server is the same as the machine name. For example, if you are std1 and you write the file /web/std1/www/sample.html, people with Web browsers can access this using the url http://lcsweb1.lcs.mit.edu/sample.html.
- tcl: This contains tcl library procedures that extend the capability of your Web server. You will be doing this in later problem sets and projects. (The .tcl pages that you work with in Problem Set 1 are not examples of these. Those pages go in www.)

Our machines are set up so you cannot telnet into them, because it is insecure. Instead, you must use an encrypted connection via ssh.

Using ssh

Installed Software

Each machine will have the following software installed:

Oracle 8.1.6 Enterprise Server
AOLServer 3.x
ArsDigita AOLserver Oracle driver
ArsDigita Cybercash interface
ImageMagick
Perl 5
Perl DBI/DBD
tcl8.2 (and tclsh8.2)
Emacs v20.3 or later
ssh
sh, ksh, csh, bash, tcsh, zsh

Your Oracle username is your shell account username, and your Oracle password is dbpw4<yourusername>

Note: There will be a fairly substantial number of processes running on each development machine. Please be courteous to others (and yourself) by not running unnecessary things. (e.g. you shouldn't need to run Netscape and you probably shouldn't be compiling things)

Using ssh
Intro to the Unix shell (commands and command documentation)
Intro to Emacs
where to find the shared utilities.tcl file
Finding documentation on the ArsDigita Community System
how to feed SQL code to Oracle via SQL*Plus at the shell: covered in the Basics problem set.
Debugging Tcl

Hal Abelson (hal@mit.edu)
Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu)
Michael Dertouzos (mld@mit.edu)
Lydia Sandon (lsandon@mit.edu)

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Last modified: August 29, 2000

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