Department of Engineering

IT Services

Teaching System Linux Servers

Introduction

As well as the terminals in the DPO we have several machines running Linux that can be accessed remotely. They have the same programs that the terminals have, but they don't have dedicated terminals attached to them. Typing server-xterm in a DPO terminal's xterm window pops up an xterm window on the server hosting the terminal. You can also remotely login to these Linux servers from within CUED. The list of servers may change. Currently we have anduril, angrist, stormbringer, mournblade, legbiter, gurthang, lobera, and harpe. These are all identical from a user perspective and will remain so. If you login to ts-access you'll be logged into one of these machines (at random) which aren't currently serving DPO or EIETL terminals.

IIA-projects and IIB-projects are linux servers for IIA/IIB project students. They can be accessed like the other servers can. For example, if you're logged into the tw105 terminal, you can open an Terminal window then type "slogin -X IIA-projects" to access the IIA-projects machine. Once you're in, then any command typed in the window will be run on the IIA-projects machine, the output appearing on tw105's terminal.

gate runs a similar version of linux as the linux servers do, but it's not intended for heavy work. Because of that, some programs (e.g. matlab) might not be available. Unlike the servers, you can access it directly from outside CUED, or even from outside the University. From gate you can then log into the linux servers.

Main Differences between the servers and terminals

  • The terminals and servers run on different types of hardware (the servers may each have 16 cores and 32G of RAM ).
  • You can't remotely log into the terminals, even from within CUED. You can only use them from the keyboard that's connected to them.
  • The terminals don't have much RAM. Big Finite-element or matlab programs can easily use up all that space. The servers not only have more RAM but they have spare capacity on hard-discs, so they're unlikely to run out of space to run programs.