Using the PCs in the Robot Lab

All the PCs in the Robot Lab except one are set up with a stand-alone Linux installation. They are treated as if they were PCs which are external to the School, however your login name and password for the Labs will work.

Because the PCs are treated like external PCs, there are important differences in the way these PCs work:

  • Your home directories on the SoCS-servers are not accessible.
  • There is no access to any SoCS-servers except the compute servers (tinky-winky for undergraduate and taught postgraduate students), and the webserver. Note that access to the webcache is not permitted.
  • Data on these PCs is not backed up - it is your responsibility to backup any files you store on these PCs.
  • There is no access to these PCs from anywhere in the School nor from the outside.
The following ways of transferring data and access to remote services are possible:
  • You can use ssh to login to the compute servers. The command is
    ssh <username>@tinky-winky
    where <username> is your username on tinky-winky.
  • USB memory sticks will work - this is very convenient when you want to transfer data between your laptop and the Robot Lab PCs.
  • For data transfer between your home directory on the School file server and the Robot Lab PCs you need to use scp . If you want to copy data from your home directory to the Robot Lab PCs you use the command
    scp <username>@tinky-winky:<remote_filename> <local_filename>
    where <remote_filename> is the name of the file on the home directory which you want to copy (relative to your home directory; you have to specify the path to the file from the home directory), and <local_filename> is the filename on the Robot Lab PC.

    If you want to copy data from your Robot Lab PC to your Robot Lab PCs you use the command
    scp <local_filename> <username>@tinky-winky:<remote_filename>
    where <local_filename> and <remote_filename> have the same meaning as before.

  • Access to other sites is possible via ssh-tunneling. The most important case is access to the webcache, which gives access to arbitrary web pages. For this, use
    ssh -f -N -L3128:webcache.cs.bham.ac.uk:3128 <username>@tinky-winky
    If this command suceeds, it will not produce any output and simply return. However, now you can set in firefox localhost as your http Proxy, and use port 3128 as always. The connection settings tab should look like:
    Firefox connection settings