October 2005

SSCC Open House

TapeStation Retiring this Month

Sharing SSCC's Resources

Fall Training

DoIT's Security Software

Resetting Passwords Reminder

Come by and see our new digs!

We're all moved in our new space in 4226 and invite everyone to drop by for an open house on Tuesday morning 9-11, October 11th. There will be treats, compliments of SSCC staff.

Tapestation Retiring this Month

SSCC's tape station in the 4218 computer lab, for reading/writing various formats of tapes created on our old VMS system (retired in 1999), will be retired at the end of October. If you have data tapes that must be read using the tape station, please plan to transfer them to other media by the end of the month. Judging by the lack of use the tapestation has seen since its retirement was first announced last December, most people have already transferred their data.

Sharing SSCC's Resources

With the beginning of a new academic year, it's time to remind SSCC members about sharing our resources:

• In fairness to others, please do not run more than one processor-intensive job at a time. Details are in SSCC's CPU Usage Policy. Instead, use Condor to run multiple Stata, R, or user- written jobs simultaneously.
• Continue to keep printing totals down. We've done a wonderful job reducing printing costs since January when we asked everyone to reduce their printing. Use our web page to keep track of your printing balance. As long as everyone remains as conscientious as they have been so far and follows SSCC's printing guidelines, we won't need to impose further restrictions.
• Last but not least, compress, delete, or archive files not in use, especially files stored on SSCC project drives/directories. Our project space on Linux is filling up at an alarming rate. Read our publication, Using Compressed Data in Linux, for ways to work with compressed data.

SSCC's Fall Training Schedule

SSCC's Fall training schedule is underway. Check out our remaining offerings on SSCC's training web pages. In October we have "Keeping Your PC Secure," Running Large Statistical Jobs using Condor," "Tuning up your PC," and "File Sharing and Permissions on Linux." Also, we've once again teamed up with Sociology 365, Computing in Social Research, so you'll find many topics offered Tuesday/Thursdays, 9:30 - 10:45, including several SAS classes. Remember that all SSCC training sessions (including Soc 365 sessions) require preregistration.

DoIT's Security Software

Last week DoIT sent an important e-mail message to everyone on campus about keeping your computers secure. They also announced the availability of free "Security Starter Software." The suite includes anti-virus, spyware protection, and firewall software. SSCC does not recommend installing the firewall software on PC's in the Social Science building at this time because we are investigating our own PC client firewall solution. Also, installing a firewall often times causes network connectivity problems with other installed software.

PCs connecting to PRIMO already have the anti-virus software installed that comes with the suite. It's a good idea to install spyware protection on your PC, so if you don't have any installed now, go ahead and install the one DoIT provides in their suite.

It's fine to install the software suite on home computers unless you use VPN to connect to SSCC computers. If you use VPN, you should not install the firewall software.

If you have questions, please contact Cory Chrisinger. Also, note that Cory will be teaching a workshop tomorrow at 1:00 on keeping your PC secure.

Resetting Passwords Reminder

In August we sent e-mail to all users about a change in policy for resetting passwords. It is very important for you to set your security questions and answers so that you can easily reset your password should you forget it. Please visit our web page for setting security questions and answers at your earliest convenience if you haven't done so already. This page will allow you to choose three security questions and answer them. Should you forget your SSCC password, you'll be able to answer the questions you gave and reset your password by visiting our password reset web page.