Student Computing Cluster Macintosh Athena FAQ

You can login to the macintosh computers with your athena username and password. If you haven't changed your password in many years, you may need to change it on a regular athena workstation first before you can login to the macintosh computers.

The first time you login there will be a set of scripts that run to setup your account for use on the machines. These take 5-7 minutes and you should not do anything while they are running. After this initial setup, subsequent logins should happen quickly.

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Why does it take so long when I login the first time?

The first time you login there are a series of scripts that are run to setup your athena account to work correctly with the macintosh computers. This involves copying basic preference files, user specific program files, etc. You should not run any applications while these scripts are running. After they run, logout and then login again. From that point onward, except when new updates are added to the machines, the process should be fairly quick.

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Where do I save my files?

This depends on what size files you are working with. By default the majority of applications will store your files within your Athena/AFS home directory. Saving to your home directory is fine for word processor documents, webpages/sites, small video files, etc. As your quota on AFS is generally under 1gb, however, larger media files may not fit within your home directory and working on these files from a network file system is generally too slow.

For larger media files you should store them (temporarily) within your folder in the "Projects" volume. A folder for you is created when you login. As this area is used by many students it is cleaned periodically so you should back up your files regularly. As of this writing if you have not used the files in your projects volume for 7 days they will be deleted. In general, you should always backup and assume that any data on these machines will be removed. Small portable firewire hard drives are relatively inexpensive and will ensure you do not lose vital data in this public space.

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When are the common folders cleaned (i.e. the projects volume)?

As of this writing all files within the "projects" volume will be deleted if you have not used them within 7 days. As this is a public lab and the machines are heavily used it is a good practice to always backup your files. Portable firewire hard drives are recommended for people who work with large media files on a regular basis. You should not trust the stability of heavily used public computers for your important projects and files. We make the projects volume available as network storage is too slow and too small for video editing purposes - not for long-term storage.

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I ran out of space, or I loaded a large media file without saving it first to the projects volume.

If you work with a large media file and do not save it first to the local "projects" volume most programs will save it to your athena home directory by default. As your afs/athena quota is generally under 1gb, most projects will quickly run out of space. If this happens you should move the file to your local projects folder and delete the version on your athena directory. If you logout and then cannot log back in again, you should try logging in from a regular athena workstation and deleting the file - afterwards you should be able to login again.

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last updated: 07.24.06