New Users' Guides to Computer Science Computing Resources

Welcome to the University of Waterloo's Computer Science Computing Facility (CSCF). This document contains essential information that will help get you familiarized with the University's computing environment.

The computing environment

The "general.cs" or general computing environment is a collection of machines meant to support general-purpose computing. The "student.cs" or student computing environment is a collection of machines meant to support student computing, mostly coursework, and shares many aspects with the Math Faculty Computing Facility (MFCF) student computing environment.

New faculty members are provided with a thin client but can request PCs that will be funded by their start up grants. Graduate students are given either a thin client or a PC, at the discretion of their supervisor.

Getting started with WatIAM

WatIAM (Waterloo Identity and Access Management) is a database of information about all students, faculty, and staff at the University of Waterloo. Currently, WatIAM is used for the following purposes:

Phone and e-mail address directory
Authentication for various campus computing systems and services
Forwarding e-mail sent to userid@uwaterloo.ca

To learn how to use WatIAM and edit your displayed personal information, refer to the WatIAM documentation

Wireless internet access

Wireless access is provided across most of the University campus, including the Math Computing building and the Davis Centre. Set your wireless card to use DHCP. You will automatically receive an IP address but cannot connect anywhere until you authenticate yourself by attempting to load any web page and entering your WatIAM credentials at the portal to which your browser will be redirected.

Waterloo email

Undergrad email addresses are of the form userid@edu.uwaterloo.ca. Non-undergrad addresses in Computer Science (CS) are of the form userid@uwaterloo.ca except for very special cases (which you need to talk to your Point of Contact to create). E-mail clients should be configured using "authenticated SMTP" (with "SSL/TLS enabled") and IMAP (with "SSL enabled") to the server "connect.uwaterloo.ca". Mozilla Thunderbird is the CSCF recommended e-mail program. A tutorial for Thunderbird may be found here.

Printing

The CS Faculty has access to several departmental printers, e.g. in Davis Centre (DC) 3507, DC 3341 and DC 3622. Many CS research groups have their own printer. Graduate students' machines are configured, by default, to print to the departmental printers in the grad student mail room (DC 2583). See printers and printer "classes" for the current list of shared CS printers.

Full-services printing and copying is available on campus from W Print. Services include thesis printing and binding, wide format printing, and large jobs,

Waterloo students may use the uPrint web-based printing service to print from any device to any of the uPrint printers located around campus.

Managing web space

Computer Science allocates web space for all faculty members and graduate students. By default, web space is designated at this address: http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~userid.

Secure Copy (SCP) and Secure Shell (SSH) can both be used to transfer files into the default web space folder "public_html". If the folder does not exist, you have to create it in your home directory, and put your index.html file inside it. Make sure the permissions are set properly:

$ chmod a+r public_html
$ chmod a+r public_html/index.html

To connect, use CSCF's CPU server hosts "linux.cs". For an SSH tutorial, go here.

To transfer files using the Unix command line, enter "scp <filename> <host>: <path>". An excellent resource that explains how to effectively use your designated Waterloo personal web space can be found here.

Additional support

Research support is provided by two different mechanisms: Dedicated support and Desktop support. Dedicated support is designed to allow the researcher or research group to choose how best to prioritize tasks to be performed by the CSCF support staff and can be used to cover work on servers, desktop machines, laptops, printers, etc. Desktop support is an inexpensive way to obtain support for specific individual machines. Faculty members may already belong to support groups, but if not, may subscribe to support groups using individual payment. New faculty should refer to their department to check their existing support group subscriptions. Grad students seeking help should refer to their supervisors. For further support, please refer to the list of Useful Links at the end of this document or consult Lawrence Folland ext. 32214. Administrative staff should contact the CSCF Help Desk or Stephen Nickerson.