Fri 23 May 2003
UPDATE
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People still dwelling on 'oldnewt' should use the correct POP3 server
address pop3.phys.unsw.edu.au to read mail from a personal
computer mail client. The address newt.phys.unsw.edu.au has
never been the correct POP3 server address and even though mail
will be correctly delivered to your 'oldnewt' account your POP3
client will not be able to read it.
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A replacement for newt has been available for the past few months. A
small percentage of existing old newt users have migrated across to the
new newt. This has served us well to debug common issues.
Mail
Mail is now being handled by a physically separate machine (Magellan).
This shares the load across existing resources and makes future upgrades
more modular and achievable. Your address does not change. You will be
given a new Physics Mail account and password. Hence your mail server
settings and protocol may need to be updated. Please follow this link
for further details: http://help.phys.unsw.edu.au/imap.php.
Importantly the School's policy is to provide IMAP functionality for remote
access and to centralise this on one server. This means that people
using POP accounts must move to IMAP. Please email us if
you are in this category. If you use local/textual mail interfaces such
as pine you will need to enter your mail password before gaining access
to your mail (this provides a higher level of security than the old newt).
Quick points
- No binary compatibility. Binaries you compiled on 'Old Newt' will not
run on 'New Newt' so they will have to be compiled again.
- NAG is so expensive we can not afford to run a copy on 'New Newt'. Use
'Lizard' if you need a Fortran77+NAG development platform.
- The free Intel Fortran 90 compiler on 'New Newt' is not Compaq Tru64
Fortran 90 and it behaves differently. Refer 'man ifc' for help. Use
F90 on 'Lizard' if ifc becomes severely problematic for you.
- Mathematica 4, Matlab R13, and a crustly old Maple can be found in the
'Science' desktop menu.
- OpenOffice can be found in the 'Editors/Office' desktop menu.
- Browsers such as Mozilla can be found in the 'Mail/Internet' folder.
- IceWM is the only window manager we support on 'New Newt' as it is
easier to provide a consistent menu of applications to users along with
a desktop environment that doesn't clobber lesser PCs and Xterminals.
- View software package list: 'portversion -vO|most"
- See details for a software package: 'pkg_info '. For example,
'pkg_info blas\*'.
- Directory allocation is as follows:
/home/grp01 [100GB] for users
/home/grp02 [220GB] (AKA /data) for data
/home/grp03 [60GB] (AKA /scratch) is not backed up
/home/grp04 [60GB] Music Acoustics/Optoelectronics only
Things that will stay the same
- Unix account names and data
- Samba accounts and roaming profiles
- Account status (open, locked, expired, retired)
- Contents of /var/tmp
- Contents of /erased_at_5am_monday (now called /scratch)
Things that will change
- Home directory groups now live in /home instead of /usr/users
(softlinks maintain the old structure for compatibility)
- Shell startup files have been moved to ~/.*__former to avoid account
access problems. If you are game then you may move the files back (using
for example, mv ~/.profile__former ~/.profile)
- Binaries compiled on the old newt will no longer run. There is no
binary compatibility with old newt so if you compiled software on the old
workstation it must be recompiled. Physics IT Support will consider all
requests to install reasonable software system wide. E-mail requests to
help@phys.unsw.edu.au
If you notice oddities or think something does not work as it should
please e-mail help@phys.unsw.edu.au. Due to our workload we may take
a few days to respond to non-critical problems.
Physics IT Support
help@phys.unsw.edu.au
http://help.phys.unsw.edu.au
