April 2007

Disk Space Installation Monday, 6:00 p.m.

Spring is Here, and the Servers are Warming Up

Winterm Changes

Disk Space Installation Monday, April 16, 6:00 p.m.

We will be installing additional disk space on Monday, April 16, beginning at 6:00 p.m. Windows Terminal Servers will be re-booted between 6:15 and 7:00 p.m. The reboot should take less than five minutes but will terminate any jobs running on the Wincenters and Winstats. E-mail and Linux services will not be interrupted unless there is some unforeseen problem. Please save your work frequently if you are working between 6:00-7:00 Monday evening. We will post a notice in the Broadcasts when the work is complete.

Spring is Here, and the Servers are Warming Up

The SSCC is currently experiencing our typical spring surge in CPU usage. The Linux servers in particular are very busy. However, there are still CPU cycles available if you know where to find them.

The most important tool is the Server Status page. It can tell you which servers are extremely busy and which have additional capacity. Checking it before starting a big job can make your job run much faster and, by using the SSCC's servers more efficiently, help everyone's jobs run faster.

A few things to keep in mind:

• KITE tends to be busier than HAL.
• The Linux servers tend to be busier than the Winstats. If your job can run under Windows, this is a great time to run it there. If you log in to the Winstats using the web interface, you'll automatically be directed to the least busy Winstat. All the major statistical software including SAS, Stata, SPSS and R are available on the Winstats.
• Remember that the SSCC has two reservable PCs in the 3218 lab for long-running jobs.
• If Condor has a CPU available, submitting your job to Condor will get you exclusive use of that CPU until your job is done--and your job won't slow down HAL or KITE. See An Introduction to Condor for instructions.
• FALCON is our 64-bit server which can make very large amounts of RAM available. Please reserve it for those whose jobs are too big to run on the other servers.

Changes in Connecting to Terminal Server from Winterms

On Wednesday, April 18, the access method to SSCC terminal servers will be modified for all Windows-based terminal (Winterms) in the building.  Individual connections to Wincenter1/2/3 and Winstat1/2/3 will be removed and replaced with one “Wincenter-Winstat” connection.

To login, simply click on the new connection to bring up the web interface.  Enter you credentials and click on Wincenter or Winstat.  The web interface has the advantage of sending you to the least busy server automatically and it allows to you reconnect to previously disconnected sessions.  Please see the SSCC Publication Using Winstat for more information.

Here are some helpful keyboard shortcuts while using a Winterm:

• Ctrl-Alt-↑ or ↓           Switches between active sessions
• Ctrl-Alt-Home           Switches to the default session (Wincenter/Winstat)
• Ctrl-Alt-End              Displays the Connection Manager