Introduction to SCS Computing Facilities
SCS Computing Facilities staff provide most computing-support services for the School of Computer Science. We are a completely separate organization from CMU Computing Services. Please contact us for any SCS computing-related problem or request.The following documentation may be particularly helpful when getting started:
- The 2012 Intro to SCS Computing Guide
- The Introduction to Facilities slides for the 2011 Immigration Course talks give an overview of SCS Computing Facilities.
- If you do not already have an SCS account, see our accounts & passwords documentation for information on how to apply for an account.
- This documentation frequently refers to different types of passwords (Kerberos passwords, instance passwords, etc). The password overview has information about what these passwords do and how to get & change them.
- One of the first things you should do is get your mail set up. See: General documentation on using e-mail SCS.
- You may wish to give yourself a web home page. See our step-by-step guide for having a home page at SCS for instructions on how to do this.
- If you will using Unix/Linux systems, you'll need to know something about AFS (at least enough to get around).
- You will most likely have a "Facilitized" machine of some sort on your desk. See our platform specific information for details on what sorts of software will be installed on this machine:
- If you are worried about whether or not your desktop machine is backed up, see our backup & restores documentation to see how to tell. Note that AFS home directories are automatically backed up.
- Our printing documentation has lists of SCS printers, indexed by location and type, along with instructions on how to print.
- Some sources of information about SCS and CMU computing:
- Our online documentation (which you are reading now) is searchable and contains answer to many common questions.
- CMU Computing Services (aka "Andrew") has extensive documentation (much of which is not applicable to SCS computing) at: http://www.cmu.edu/computing
- Zephyr is a realtime chat system in use at SCS (and Andrew). The Frequently Zephyred Questions contains answers to many common SCS-specific questions, along with instructions on how to participate in Zephyr. There is also a Zephyr archive that is a searchable database of past messages.
- The newsgroup cmu.cs.scs contains important announcements (e.g. machine outages, etc) and should be required reading.