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General

What computing resources/support does The University provide for its faculty members?

The University website, http://www.arizona.edu/, is the first place to search for such information. A listing of Faculty resources is available under the "Employment/Faculty" heading. Of particular interest might be the page Computing Resources for Faculty.

What computing resources/support does the Mathematics Department provide to its faculty members?

The Mathematics Department maintains a network of computers running GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows for faculty, visitor, staff, and graduate student use. There is support for e-mail, hosting personal webpages, and using scientific software. These computers are available in the following labs: M103 (faculty/visitor/staff) and M224/225/227 (graduate students). There are also two classrooms (M101/102) for computer-related instruction.

While the great majority of Department faculty members do have an office computer system with network connectivity, there is no institutional commitment for the maintenance or support of such services. In conjunction with certain teaching responsibilities, the Mathematics Department sometimes obtains University funding to provide laptops for instructional use. It is hoped that The University will continue to support such instructional initiatives.

I need an office computer. What should I do?

The University provides one-time start-up assistance to new tenure-track faculty, under which the Mathematics Department obtains an office computer (with 3 years of hardware warranty support). The University does not provide start-up assistance for its non-tenure-track faculty hires.

The University does not (May, 2002) provide replacement computers (after the initial start-up support) for its faculty. Tenure-track faculty members are encouraged to submit proposals for support of research activities. All faculty members are eligible to participate in The University's instructional support programs (see above).

I have questions about using my computer. What should I do?

Please look through the information available on our Math Department Computer Support Site, and the information available on the other local websites listed on the right side of our Support Homepage. You might also search Google for the information.

After verifying that the information does not appear on our webpages, please contact the computer support staff with your question. Note that if the information does appear on our pages, we'll simply direct you to that page; otherwise, we'll simply attempt to search for an answer in Google.

My computer isn't working right. I urgently need a computer!

The Department faculty/visitor/staff lab (M401) is available for such emergencies.

The University does not provide maintenance/repair services for department computer systems. For faculty, per incident and blanket maintenance support/repair services are available under state contract. The annual cost to maintain an office computer with printer and monitor is about $300. Annual contracts have to be purchased in July. Monthly rates are also available, but are slightly higher than annual rates. Finally, per incident maintenance is provided at a rate of about $35 per hour. For a detailed price list, or if you want to subscribe, contact the Business Office.

Department systems under warranty (this usually means: within 3 years of purchase) will be repaired following the warranty procedure. This may take a number of weeks. Please contact the computer support staff to start a warranty procedure.

I hired someone to help me with a project, and we need ....

Material and service support for University sponsored projects is obtained via the terms of the grant. Per incident and blanket maintenance support/repair services are available under state contract (user payment required).

Network

My office computer is not connecting to the building network. What should I do?

If possible, contact the computer support staff with your name, office number, the date and time when the problem occurred, and any other details you consider relevant. Otherwise, call the math department office (621-6892) and ask for the computer support staff to be contacted on your behalf (with the same information as requested above, along with a telephone number for reaching you).

My department-owned laptop is not connecting to the internet from home. What should I do?

Please contact the computer support staff to arrange a time for us to meet with you and your laptop.

My home computer is not connecting to the University network. What should I do?

Contact your internet provider and/or computer support service.

I have a personal laptop that I sometimes use in my office. Can I get a building network connection?

Please see this page.

My network access has been blocked. What should I do?

UITS blocks infected computers. You'll need to eliminate all malware from your computer, also ensure your virus protection is up-to-date, and that all your operating system patches have been applied (in the case of Microsoft Windows, you must run Windows Update, install all updates, reboot, again run Windows Update, install all the new updates that are now available to your system, reboot, and keep repeating this cycle until there are no more updates to be installed). Once your computer is clean, up-to-date, and protected, please contact the computer support staff and we will ask UITS to unblock your computer.

How do I determine whether my virus-protection is up-to-date?

If you're running SophosRU (and you should be!), simply hover your mouse over the SophosRU icon in your system tray (lower right of screen, the icon is blue dots arranged in a circle): you will be informed when the last update took place. Double-click the icon to force an immediate update.

How do I see the printjobs in the queue and remove my job?

If you're still on the computer from which you submitted the job, use the command lpq -a. Or in general, you can use the command lpq -a -h printserver.

To remove a job, if you're still on the computer from which you submitted the job, use the command lprm jobnumber, where the jobnumber can be seen in the output from lpq (see previous paragraph).

If you're on a different computer and need to remove your job, use the command lprm -h printserver -U yourusername jobnumber.

There exist other printer-related commands that start with “lp” (which stands for “line printer”). Type lp and then hit TAB a couple times to see a list of possible command completions. To learn more about a particular command, take a look at the built-in manual page, e.g., man lpq.

Email

How do I get a math department e-mail address?

Please see this page.

What is my e-mail address?

Please see this page.

How do I send and receive e-mail?

Please see this page.

What are the mail server names?

Please see: how to configure your e-mail client.

Can I send e-mail to local users simply as “username@math” instead of the lengthier “username@math.arizona.edu”?

Do not. Even if that works today, it may stop working tomorrow. Please address mail to local users either in the simple unqualified form username or in the fully qualified form username@math.arizona.edu. Anything else is incorrect. The correct forms should work from any of our systems, whether in your office, in a lab, or in webmail—if not, please contact the support staff.

I have a message to send to many people. What system-wide mailing categories (aliases) are available?

Please see this intranet page.

When are the system-wide aliases updated?

They are updated whenever we are informed of changes by the various academic offices.

How do I set up a class e-mail list?

If you want a private e-mail list (that only you send messages to), simply create your own alias list.

If you want a public e-mail list (that you and others—such as your students—can send messages to), you can ask UITS to set up a LISTSERV for your class.

Can I forward my math e-mail elsewhere?

Certainly. Please see: how to forward your e-mail.

My saved-messages used to show the recipient address, but now I see my own name at “hedgehog” in every message. How can I fix this?

Many mail programs will show the recipient address when the sender address is your own. Your address used to be you@hedgehog.math.arizona.edu, but now it is simply you@math.arizona.edu. Thus your address no longer matches the sender address in old e-mail, and consequently the e-mail software displays the sender address instead of the recipient address. Annoying, eh?

This is very difficult to fix properly, as it requires editing old mailbox files to fix up your sender address. However, some mail programs rely on precomputed content-lengths of messages, so simply editing the file will mess all of that up. Furthermore, you really only want to fix the message sender address, as opposed to all the routing addresses that show up in the extended headers.

The following code just does a brute-force replace. Thus it may mess things up for some e-mail software, and it certainly messes up the extended headers, so it'll be impossible to figure out how an old message got routed through various mail servers. (The latter may not be important to you.) At least the code below makes a backup, so you can try it and see whether you like the results. 

cd
cp -a mail mail_bkup
cd mail
perl -pi -e "s/\@hedgehog\.math\.arizona\.edu/\@math\.arizona\.edu/g;" *

You may want to run a similar set of commands on your other mail folders as well. After doing this, open up your saved mail in all the e-mail client programs you rely on (webmail, pine, outlook, eudora, whatever). Make sure you're happy with how things look. (Also click on messages, make sure they show up okay.) Once you're convinced all is well, you could delete the backup copies: 

cd
rm -r mail_bkup

On the other hand, if you don't like the results, you'll want to put the backups back in place: 

cd
mv mail_bkup mail

What can I do to receive less spam?

Spam is similar to physical junk mail: to receive less of it, ensure that fewer people out there have your address. Many of us post our e-mail address on websites, and we give out our address freely when asked for it by various websites out there. Many websites require an e-mail address for registration, and those sites in turn may sell your address to others. Here are some steps you can take:

  • In posting your own e-mail address on your own webpages or in blogs or other public forums, write it in an obfuscated form, for example: 
    You can contact me at johnNO@SPAMmath.arizona.edu,
being sure to remove the "NO SPAM" part of the address.
    Some people simply use: 
    You can contact me at the following
address: john at math.arizona.edu.
    Whatever technique you use, if it is popular and has been in use for a while, you can bet that automated robots out there are able to make sense of it. Thus, invent your own technique, and re-invent it periodically if you see that others are using the same technique. (NOTE: As of March 2004, the main math site www.math.arizona.edu does list everyone's e-mail address. We are endeavoring to fix that.)
  • When accessing sites that require free registration, do not give out your personal information (including your e-mail address). Instead of fabricating information yourself, which can be time consuming each time, you might just use someone else's fabricated registration. To that end, check out the free service bugmenot.com.
  • Some sites must e-mail you once or twice, and you want them to e-mail you once or twice, but you don't want them to e-mail you again, and you don't want anyone else to e-mail you either. The free service mailinator.com is what you seek!

To reduce spam, would it be possible to disguise e-mail addresses on the department website?

You have probably seen other departments replacing the @ symbol with a different one, or inserting some words such as "NO SPAM" (see the previous question/answer for more on this), or displaying e-mail addresses as images instead of as text. Since others are doing this, you may think that this is an effective solution to the spam problem, and thus we too should be doing this. Unfortunately, disguising e-mail addresses does not solve the problem. Instead, it impacts legitimate users (who can no longer click on a link, or easily copy/paste an address), forcing them to manually type or manually edit the e-mail address, leading at a minimum to inconvenience but often also leading to mistakes and sometimes even lost messages. (If you send an e-mail to an incorrect yet legitimate address, the receiver may quietly delete the message. You'll get no bounce message. You'll never know the intended recipient did not receive your message. Furthermore, sensitive information may end up in the wrong hands. The situation may appear ridiculously unlikely; yet, it regularly bites members of our own department.

Keep in mind that almost every trick a human can think of to disguise an address in a systematic fashion will be easily defeated by the harvesters (who simply write small computer programs to "undo the trick"). All the standard tricks are quite familiar to the harvesters. Departments that use these tricks merely give their users a false sense of protection. It is a way of deflecting blame. (If you suddenly receive a bunch of spam, and you complain to such a department's system staff, they can deflect, "Well, we've disguised the address, so the spam is not our fault." We don't believe in misleading our users in that fashion.) Actually, the entire question of how to disguise information in such a way that a human can easily see the true information yet no robot can do so is an active area of research in computer science (specifically, artificial intelligence research). To read more about this, search the web on the keyword "CAPTCHA".

If disguising the addresses were the correct approach to the spam problem, we assure you we would take that approach. Another approach, used by some departments, is to not publish e-mail addresses at all; instead, there would be a webform on the department website for sending e-mail to department members. But this prevents people from using their usual e-mail client to send messages. Furthermore, some spammers already recognize such forms, and simply use the forms to send the spam, without ever learning the recipient's e-mail address. So you see, it is a no-win situation.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to significantly reduce the spam problem. Our recommendation is that you make use of an e-mail client that has a built-in "personal junk filter". For example, Mozilla Thunderbird has such a filter, and if you're not already using Thunderbird, our system staff would be happy to help you get started.

I just received an encoded e-mail message. What do I do?

Usually the encoding type is specified in the mail headers, so modern mail readers will be able to decode the message automatically. Try looking at the message using Webmail, mutt, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, or pine. The command munpack may be handy. Ultimately, though, you may have to ask the sender how the message was encoded and ask for instructions on decoding it.

I'm getting weird e-mail returned to me, but I never sent any of it. Do I have a virus?

This is indeed indication of a virus infection somewhere in the world, but often has absolutely nothing to do with you (nor with our buildings, nor with which operating system you use). Essentially, some computer somewhere is infected, and is sending out e-mails with forged headers stemming from the Address Books on the infected computers. Apparently your address is showing up in the forged header. (Perhaps you once communicated with someone somewhere, and now their computer is infected.) Some of those e-mails can't be delivered and thus get bounced back to the person named in the forged headers, which in this case is you.

We suggest you ignore/delete the bogus messages you're receiving.

Backup

How often is my office desktop machine backed up?

The computer support staff never backs up the data on machines in offices. You are responsible for doing this yourself.

How often is my system account backed up?

System accounts reside on the fileservers philologus and grad. Portions of each fileserver are copied to magnetic tape five days a week (in the middle of the night). The schedule is such that your account files are copied to tape at least twice a week. The tape rotation set comprises fifteen tapes. Thus, at any given moment, there should be six copies of your account files, spanning the last three weeks of changes. There are no backups going back further than three weeks. Furthermore, tapes sometimes fail, so of the six copies of your account, we may only get useful data out of a few of the copies (and those few might the oldest copies in the set). In short, if you ask us to restore a file from a backup, we may be able to comply, but the backup may be a few weeks old. Therefore, we highly recommend that you periodically make your own backups, especially after making a lot of important changes to your files.

How do I get a file restored from a backup?

To get a file restored, please contact the support staff immediately. Be sure to tell us the full path name of the file (i.e., tell us both the filename and which subdirectory or subdirectories of your account the file resided in), and also be sure to tell us the precise date and time the file was ruined or deleted. Please be aware that it takes two to four hours (per tape!) to restore files. The requested information helps us identify which tape is most likely to have what you seek. Because we may have to dig through multiple tapes, and because we may not be able to get to your request immediately, expect to wait up to a week to have your files restored. Please also be aware that we cannot guarantee the procedure to be successful. For this reason, we always recommend that you make your own backups, relying on us only as a last resort.

How do I make my own backups?

In the past, it was common to copy files to magnetic media, such as a floppy disk or a ZIP disk. Today, you will do better to burn your files onto a CD. They are inexpensive, are not susceptible to magnetic damage, and last a long time. (However, their exact shelf life is not well-understood, and seems to depend on the brand as well as the temperature and humidity where the CD is stored. Don't rely on more than a couple years! To learn more, try searching for "CDR shelf life" or "CDR lifetime" in Google.)

We have instructions on how to burn files to a CD in Linux.

Short of burning CDs, is there anything else I can do to protect files on my office computer?

At a minimum, keep a second copy of your files on your hard disk, and update the copy whenever you make important changes to your files! For example, on a Linux system, you can copy your local account files to your /scratch partition using the following command:

cp -a /home/myaccountname /scratch/

This will protect you from your own mistakes (such as accidentally deleting a file), but will not protect you from a physical hard disk failure. Thus, periodically, be sure to make a backup onto removable media.

Webpages

How do I create a personal webpage on the math department system?

Your public website resides in your network account in the subdirectory pub_http_internet. All files located there can be accessed by a web browser. Your personal homepage should be in a file called index.html. You can also put additional files in that subdirectory, and you can link to them from your index.html using HTML syntax. (You'll probably want to learn a little about HTML, or you might get away with just using a GUI editor.)

How do I get my personal webpage listed in the department directory?

After setting up your personal webpages, to active the "Homepage" link in the department people list, please contact the Academic Office.

How do I get my personal homepage listed in the university directory?

Please see http://homepage.web.arizona.edu/.

Is there a reason why my pub_http_internet directory has all the read permissions disabled?

Short answer: The default setup for new accounts grants the minimum permissions necessary for your webpages to be accessible. To decide whether you want to grant additional permissions, see the longer answer below.

Prerequisite: To understand the following longer answer, you should know a little about Unix file permissions. In short, each file and each directory carries separate read/write/execute permissions for you, for members of your group, and for all other users (the latter category includes the public webserver). You see these permissions when you issue the command ls -l. For files, the meaning of the permissions is self-explanatory. For directories, the permissions have special meanings: read permission is the right to see a listing of the directory contents, write permission is the right to create new files/directories or delete files/directories inside the given directory, and execute permission is the right to attempt to access (read or write contents of) files inside the given directory; whether the latter succeeds furthermore depends on whether the file in question has appropriate permissions set.

For your public webpages in pub_http_internet to be accessible, at a minimum both your home directory and the directory pub_http_internet must have execute permission granted to other (non-owner and non-group) users. This minimum requirement lets people reach webpages if they know the URL of the page.

If you grant read permission on pub_http_internet, and if you furthermore delete your index.html file, then web browsers pointed at your home page URL will see a directory listing instead of an error message. Many users consider this a good thing. To grant this directory read permission, issue the commands:

cd
chmod go+r pub_http_internet
To remove this permission, issue the commands: 
cd
chmod go-r pub_http_internet

(By the way: The execute permission on your home directory, which is necessary for your webpages to work, unfortunately also allows fellow users within the math department to access files inside your home directory if they know the name of the file and if the file gives read permission to group or others. To keep other users out of your home directory, ensure that your private files have read permission only for yourself. A simple trick is to put all your private files inside subdirectories that give read/write/execute permission only to yourself---then it makes no difference what permissions the files inside those subdirectories have.)

Whom do I contact to have a research project advertised on the departmental website?

The department does not maintain a list of research projects; instead, there is a listing of faculty areas of interest, and each research area links to a brief description which may optionally include a link to a separate website maintained by that research group. If your research project fits into one or more groups, please contact those groups to get the project listed on the group's webpages. If your project does not fit into an existing research group, please contact the department head if you feel the list of research groups needs to be amended.

Whom do I contact to have an outreach project advertised on the departmental website?

Please contact the computer support staff.

I am incorrectly listed on (or missing from) the departmental people directory. Whom do I contact to get this fixed?

The website data is updated periodically from data maintained by the department's Business Office. Please contact the Business Office to have the data corrected.

How do I get items added to the department's event calendar (weekly news)?

To submit items, please refer to the Weekly News Intranet Page.

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