Tips for using DICE (and other University of Edinburgh computer systems

Disclaimer: None of these suggestions are officially sanctioned.

Ugly DICE Usernames

The unfortunate DICE username scheme of the letter "s" followed by a string of digits makes it rather awkward to answer simple questions like "who is the student using all the CPU on the gateway machine?" or "who has queued 200 jobs to the printer?". To get around this to some extent, you can use these scripts on DICE:

You should read the README at /home/s9808248/edtools/README if you actually want to use these.

Wireless

It's annoying to have to manually log into the central wireless access point network, so I wrote a script to automatically log in and out of the Bluesocket system. (There are various similar scripts on the web, but I preferred to write my own.)

The script is bluesocket and should ideally be run automatically when your wireless interface is raise or lowered, like this:

auto lo eth6

iface lo inet loopback

iface eth6 inet dhcp
        wireless-essid central
        wireless-mode Managed
        post-up  su - mark -c "bluesocket"
        pre-down su - mark -c "bluesocket --logout"

Self-Managing

If you're a research student who has their own dedicated machine, you have the option to manage your own computer (or go to the half-way house DIY DICE system.) If you're used to managing your own system, then I strongly recommend self-managing, since either you end up installing vast amounts of software in your home directory or have to pester support to get things installed.

Printing to DICE Pinters

If you haven't set up access to the printers via Samba, as described below, the simplest way to print to Informatics printers is to use aliases like the following in your .bashrc:

alias slpr='ssh sXXXXXXX@staff.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk lpr'
alias slpq='ssh sXXXXXXX@staff.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk lpq'

So you can then print with, for example, slpr -Pfh8 <test-page.ps. (You should, of course, have passwordless authentication set up to make the use of SSH like this less irritating.)

Samba Access to DICE

There is an Informatics Samba server that will give you fairly easy access to your DICE home directory and the printers.

Printing to Samba printers with CUPS

Once you have your Samba login, you can add DICE printers to your local CUPS. To do this, go to http://localhost:631/ and click "Add printer". I would keep the "Name" field the same as the DICE name to avoid confusion, set "Location" to be the room number the printer is in and "Description" the model. After you press "Continue" you'll be prompted for the "Device" in a drop down list - select "Windows Printer via SAMBA". On the next page you are prompted for the printer URI - as suggested on the official page on printing from CUPS on Mac OS X to DICE printers, the format of the URI should be something like:

smb://s9808248:notmypassword@INFORMATICS/smb.inf.ed.ac.uk/if237c0

Be careful with the password here - remember that it's the Samba password you got when you created your Samba account, not your DICE password or EASE login. I found that using the wrong password produced the unhelpful error "Unable to connect to CIFS host, will retry in 60 seconds..."

If you click the Printers tab, you should now see the printer you just added and "Print test page" should work OK.

Printing to Samba printers with LPRng

I wouldn't recommend using LPRng any more for printing to DICE printers over Samba, since the CUPS method is much neater. This is here for reference, though, in case people don't like CUPS

If you use lprng then variations on the following /etc/printcap may make this more transparent:

fh8:\
       :cm=hp LaserJet 4100dtn:\
       :sd=/var/spool/lpd/fh8:\
       :af=/var/spool/lpd/fh8/acct:\
       :if=/usr/local/bin/smbprint:\
       :mx=0:\
       :lp=/dev/null:\
       :sh:

fh9:\
       :cm=hp LaserJet 4300dtn:\
       :sd=/var/spool/lpd/fh9:\
       :af=/var/spool/lpd/fh9/acct:\
       :if=/usr/local/bin/smbprint:\
       :mx=0:\
       :lp=/dev/null:\
       :sh:

# etc. etc.

Note that this calls smbprint as an input filter, so you need to make sure you have smbprint set up correctly. Basically, after adding those entries to /etc/printcap you should run checkpc as root to create the spool directory, and create a file:

-rw------- 1 daemon lp 73 2006-11-06 14:12 /var/spool/lpd/fh8/.config

... which contains details of the samba service:

server=smb.inf.ed.ac.uk
service=fh8
username=sXXXXXXX
password=notreallymypassword

There are various versions of smbprint around; that config may not be exactly right for your setup.