# Scenarios - Student View

Joe User, a Chem Eng major, has received an assignment using Aspen software. He know that his professor has reserved the Windows cluster/classroom expressly for the use of his class every evening this week between 7 and 10 PM, and he comes in at 7:30, finds a vacant machine, and logs in using his normal MITnet username and password.

He sees a typical Windows screen, but since he is registered for the Chem Eng class the 'programs' sub-menu of his 'Start' menu has some extra entries. He looks at the submenu 'Courseware' and selects 'Aspen'. The Aspen software hasn't yet been installed on this computer so the MSI installer mounts the AFS locker with the software and installs the core components of the application on the fly. After a minute or two the application has started. He starts by opening the Web browser and accessing the 10.999 course Web page, where the description of the assignment is located. After working for a few minutes he realizes that he doesn't understand part of the instructions. Since he is on Windows machine and he doesn't like using telnet to access OLC or OLTA he tries using Zephyr-for-Windows. He uses the 10.999 Zephyr instance to see if anyone else knows what certainly terminology in the wording of the assignment means, and gets an answer from a fellow-student that allows him to proceed.

He wants to save his work and tries to do so. Because Aspen is not Logo compliant it tries to save the user's data to the local disk in the "My Documents" directory instead of the correct "My Documents" directory which is mapped to the user's home directory in AFS. At first the user doesn't notice and he just hits the save button. Aspen complains that it can't save the files. In the Pismere environment the local "My Documents" is read-only so that users can't write to it by default. This prevents them from accidentally saving files on the local machine instead of AFS. The user looks again and notices that "My Documents" is empty instead of containing the files and subdirectories from his home directory. He clicks in the browser of the 'Save' dialogue box and then selects the correct area of his home directory and saves the data without further incident.

Once he has finished the assignment, he fills out a form on the course Web page that pertains to this assignment, which then sends his output file back to the course TA's for grading.

Since the cluster is not yet full, with no one waiting for a free machine, he decides to stay logged in here to do his 18.06 homework as well. He needs to use Maple and is pretty sure that he can access the Windows 2000 version from this machine, but doesn't know just where it is located. He looks at the 'Programs' menu and checks under 'Numerical/Math' and then finds Maple under 'Analysis and Plotting'. And since Maple uses the correct registry keys to figure out which 'My Documents' to use, he has no problems saving his data to his home directory.

He has a problem with Maple, and nobody is responding on the 18.06 instance. He knows that there isn't a native OLC client for Windows, but he starts up Emacs and uses the olc package for it, so that he can ask a question. While he's waiting for a response, he decides to read email. Since he is already in Emacs, and he uses Linux in his dorm room, he decides to use Emacs this time. He's tried using Eudora before but he doesn't like it. Even though it saves the mail in his home directory, while he is using a Pismerized machine, it uses a different mailbox format than he uses when he is using his dorm machine or an Athena workstation. He could use a conversion utility but it pushed him over quota during the conversion once so he tries to avoid it.

As it turns out, OLC does get back to him with an answer about Maple very soon, and so he's able to complete assignments for both subjects, 10.999 using software that only runs under Windows, and 18.03, using general software that he's been using for the past two years on Athena. He had thought that he would also be able to use Microsoft Word in this cluster/classroom to write a paper that is due in his Humanities class, but he finds out that IS has decided not to make the Microsoft Office suite universally available on Pismerized Windows machines. Although he normally runs Linux in his dorm room, the machine will also boot Windows98 because of some of the games that he likes to play. His Windows98 partition also has a copy of Word on it. He'll use it to write his lab report. Unfortunately he can't access the private data in his home directory from Windows 98 so he'll have to use Linux to first copy the files from his home directory to his local disk. But since he has access to his home directory from both the Pismere cluster and his own computer in his room by going through the intermediate step of using Linux for file transfer, he can incorporate the results of his 10.999 assignment into a full lab report from his room. (He had earlier checked out the OLC stock answers and Pismere on-line help to make sure that the file formats are compatible and that he can indeed access the necessary files in his home directory from four places - the Pismere cluster, an Athena cluster, his own Linux machine, and a friend's Windows2000 machine.)