Account Basics

This page aims to list the basics bits of a UGCS account that you might want to know to get stuff done.

An introduction to our email services can be found at Email Basics

If you're interested in more discussion about UGCS, join the ugcs-forum mailing list by going to https://hermes.ugcs.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ugcs-forum

Filesystem

• Your home directory is located on afs at /afs/.ugcs/user/<username> (hereafter refered to as '~'). You can give other users access to your files- see our page on AFS
• Your webspace is located at ~/public/html, and is viewable at www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~<username>/ PHP scripts can be put in this directory, and if they end in .php they will be run as php scripts
• Your cgi bin directory is ~/public/cgi-bin, and is accessible at www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~username/cgi-bin (this is not configurable). As long as a file is executable, it will be usable as a cgi-script. CGI scripts are run as your UID and with the <username>_cgi AFS prinicpal.
• You have a 2gb home directory quota and a 500mb mail quota. Data in your mail directory does not count against your home directory quota. You can check your quotas with the following commands:

fs lq ~/ # Home directory quota
fs lq ~/Maildir # Maildir quota

If you need more space, contact a sysadmin

• Daily snapshots of your home directory can be found in /afs/.ugcs/backups/user/username. If you accidentally delete a file, check here for a version as of approximately 7am.

Shell environment

• SSH to "to.ugcs.caltech.edu" to access our shell servers. "to.caltech.edu" is an alias for "to.ugcs.caltech.edu"
• Your default shell is bash. You can change it by running "chsh" (we have already modified it to work with LDAP. We support bash, zsh, csh, tcsh, and ksh.
• If you ran your job in a screen session and can't find it anymore, make sure you are on the same computer that you started it on. If you aren't sure, run "mssh screen -ls" to see which machine it is on.
• You can run the same command on multiple machines at once by using mssh

Services

• We do not support cron; however, we are working on getting it set up.
• You have access to a postgres database. See postgres for more information. You can access it by running

psql -h postgres

Miscellaneous

• Please set a mailAlternateAddress so we may use it to reset your password if you ever forget it. You can set one by running

mail_alias youraddress@example.com