What to do when you get a TEMPORARY HOME DIRECTORY
If you receive a message when you log in that you cannot attach your
directory and must use a temporary directory, or suddenly start seeing
"timed out" error messages accessing your files during a login
session, do not panic thinking that your account has been deleted.
The server on which your files are stored is probably down. Depending
on what caused the crash, your files may be restored quickly, or may
take some time; in rarer cases, your files may need to be restored
from backup.
To see information on the current status of the problem, any estimated
time of recovery, or information on files which need to be restored
from backup tapes, type "olc motd" to view the current OLC message of
the day. If the MOTD doesn't mention the outage, let OLC know.
While your fileserver is down, you can still work. You can attach any
directories that are on other fileservers. This usually includes such
places as your course's locker and the sipb locker. You can read your
mail. (See the stock answer under MAIL for details.) You can even do
homework! The only catch with homework is that after it is saved, you
have to store it somewhere, as you can neither leave it in your own nor
the temporary directory. There are few things you can do:
1. Mail the file to yourself with the following command:
setenv MH /dev/null
mhmail yourusername < homework_file
The drawback is that mail is sometimes not very efficient, and that
mailing large files is discouraged.
Then, the next time that you log in, you can "inc" your homework
assignment and save it into a file in your own locker.
2. Save it on a floppy or zip disk. This is the best option -- if the
file is at all important, save it on two floppies. You can find
instructions on how to use floppies and zip disks in the stock
answers under the topic "WORKSTATIONS".
3. Put your files in the "bitbucket" locker. This should *only* be used
for files that are not confidential or personal. Files in this
locker can be read, deleted, and overwritten by ANYONE, can they can
be accessed via the web. Search engines such as Google can also
index the files in this locker and cache them, also this can be
avoided by putting your files in a format Google cannot read, such as
a .zip file, or a .tar file.
Also note that there is NO guarantee that your files will remain
there for any time whatsoever. On the average, though, they remain
about two days. Type:
attach bitbucket
mkdir /mit/bitbucket/YOURUSERNAME
Then place your files in the directory you just created. Be sure to
read the file /mit/bitbucket/00README.bitbucket/README.
The only thing you can't do when your fileserver is down is to continue
work on an existing file, or reference any existing files.
When your fileserver comes back up, type:
renew
at the athena prompt. That will prompt you for your password and
re-authenticate you to the fileserver.
Last updated: $Date: 2003/11/13 15:30:30 $
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