• Zoom; if you are one of the REU 2023 students, you'll need this for the ROOT tutorial

• ssh ("Secure SHell"), a program for communicating with a remote computer

• ssh, a program for communicating with a remote computer
• an X11 emulator; X11 is the graphics-window protocol used by UNIX systems

• Zoom; if you are one of the REU 2022 students, you'll need this for the ROOT tutorial

exit

or just close the terminal window.

To learn more about Linux/UNIX

Either one of these is a good starting resource:

• UNIX Tutorial for Beginners
• Learn UNIX

Initial laptop setup for the Nevis particle-physics Linux cluster

This page is intended for those students, guests, and researchers connecting to Nevis for the first time. It describes how to set up your laptop or remote desktop with the necessary software to do work on our systems.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the systems administrator.

Minimal requirements

Your laptop (or remote desktop) will need:

• ssh
• an X11 emulator

Here are download links for software that you may also need:

• Zoom; if you are one of the REU 2021 students, this is mandatory
• VPN, but only if your work will require a remote connection to a system that's behind the Nevis firewall

UNIX/Linux systems (including Debian and Ubuntu)

You've got ssh and X11 already.

Mac OS systems

You've got ssh already. For Mac 10.7 and later, you'll need to install XQuartz.

Windows systems

If you don't already have an ssh or X11 emulator installed, I suggest mobaXterm, which includes both and is free. Once you've installed the program, be sure to enable X11 forwarding.

First login

If haven't logged into one of the Nevis particle-physics systems before, you should have received an email with following information:

• account name
• access code (this is a password, but I don't like using that word in emails to avoid triggering hacker scans)
• server name

Using ssh, connect to your server. On Linux and Mac OS systems, run the Terminal program; on Windows system you should have a terminal within mobaXterm.

ssh <account>@<server-name>

For example, if that email told you that your account name was jsmith, your access code was logmein, and your server name was olga.nevis.columbia.edu, then you'd connect with:

ssh jsmith@olga.nevis.columbia.edu

and type logmein when you were prompted for a password.

Once you've logged in for the first time, please change your password using the passwd command. Just type

passwd

Note: I cannot recover your password if you've forgotten it; I can only reset it. I strongly advise you to get a password manager if you don't already use one.

-- William Seligman - 2021-05-26