Hints for Making mason.gmu.edu Usable

A long time ago, I wrote a manual on how to make the Mason Cluster a little easier to use for people who have some experiences with Linux systems. It was a real challenge, because it was running DEC's horribly disfigured version of UNIX. Apparently, the folks in charge realized how horrible it was, and decided to upgrade. Unfortunately, they "upgraded" to Solaris 10, and kept the horrible backwards configurations. I can only assume they did this to make the poor folks who had gotten used to the original system more comfortable.

So after many years, here is an updated set of hints for making mason.gmu.edu more useful.

Style Conventions

Your default prompt probably looks something like:

mason>

That's ghastly. I'll show you how to fix that a little later. In the meantime, I'm going to use $ as the prompt.

Changing to the Bash Shell

If you're user of Linux, or if your Solaris administrator is kind, you're probably used to using the bash shell instead of the default csh on the mason cluster. Personally, I'm completely incapable of using csh, so the first thing I did was try to change my shell to bash.

On the old broken DEC system, you could change your shell quite simply using the chsh program. The problem was that bash was not installed on the system. So, at the time, I decided to set up ksh, which was at least minimally useful. Later, I actually put a copy of bash compiled for DEC UNIX into my home directory, and used that.

Once they changed over to Solaris, things were much improved. The system now has a working copy of bash. Unfortunately, you no longer have the ability to change your shell. Why this is, is beyond my feeble comprehension.

So, the best thing we can do is replace the default login shell with bash, as soon as we log in. The method to do that is slightly different depending on what your default shell is. I'm going to cover csh and ksh.

Using your favorite editor (pico if you're a beginner, or vi if you're more advanced), you'll want to edit (or create) two files.

Add the following to the end of .login
set shell=/bin/bash exec /bin/bash --login

Add the following to the end of .profile
export SHELL=/bin/bash exec /bin/bash --login

Now you should be able to log out, then log back in, and you should have a prompt that ends with a dollar sign ('$'). That's a good start.

Setting the Prompt

Now that you've got a shell that's a little friendlier, we have to configure it so that it's actually useful. We'll start with the prompt. If you're a Linux user, you're probably used to a prompt that looks a little like this:

brian@ziege:~/src$

To set this up, you need to edit your .bash_profile file.

Add the following to the end of .bash_profile

export PS1='\u@\h:\w$ '

The \u is replaced by your login name, the \h is replaced by the host name, and the \w is replaced by your current directory (or a tilde if you're in your own home directory).

This may not be so important to you, but if you have a lot of Unix accounts, like I do, you should know which user you're logged in as, and what system you're logged in to. Obviously, you can customize your prompt to suit your needs.

Setting up your web space

To create a web page on the Mason cluster, you will need to first create the directory that contains the public web accessible files, and then set up the permissions on this directory and your web site. You can do this using the following commands:

$ cd $ mkdir public_html $ chmod 711 . $ chmod 755 public_html

The first line changes to your home directory (if you weren't already there), the next line creates a directory called "public_html", which is where all of the files on your web page will be stored. The next two lines changes the permissions on your home directory and public_html directory so that the web server is able to see your web files. This should not affect the permissions on the rest of your files. Do not put any files you do not want publicly available in public_html, or in any of its subdirectories.

Try creating a file called "index.html" in the public_html directory, and then you should be able to see it in a web browser by visiting http://mason.gmu.edu/~your_user_name/. If you still aren't able to access your files, you may also need to change the permissions on files you create, so that they are also visible to the world. Use the chmod command to do that:

$ chmod 644 index.html

Getting around UNIX

A simple search on Google for "unix cheat sheet" yields many good results. The very first result seems fairly useful: http://www.rain.org/~mkummel/unix.html. These sorts of sites tend to come and go, but that's why you have Google.

John Stone's vi guide

If you're not familiar with the vi editor, and you'd like to learn to use one of the most powerful tools in all of computing, then take a look at John Stone's Beginner's guide to vi and ex.

Professor Montecino's GMU computing information

One particular resource you may find useful is the Mason web site of Professor Virginia Montecino, which describes in detail the steps for activating your account, and setting up permissions to create a web page.