"csehelp" is the group of people who will be your first contact point for technical questions and take care of many of your technical needs.
We have a web area at: http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/department-administration/computing-support.html
If you have questions or problems regarding CSE computing resources or software and can't find an answer on the web, you'll want to enter your issue into our trouble ticket system.
What you need to do:
Send your requests and problem reports to csehelp@cs.ucsd.edu. The trouble ticket system will process all email sent to that address. It is important that all requests are sent to the CSEHelp address rather than directly to any particular staff member.
When you send in email to csehelp@cs.ucsd.edu you will receive an automated response message. This message will include information about your request and general information about the Trouble Ticket System itself. This is a good message to hang on to until your issue is resolved. You do not need to respond to this message. The most important part of this return email will be in the subject line. If you were to send in message like:
To: csehelp@cs.ucsd.edu From: gradstudent@cs.ucsd.edu Subject: I need some help The subject line of the automated reply will look something like: Subject: [csehelp #12345]: I need some help This tells you the number that has been assigned to your request. In this case, 12345. It is important that any further email you send to csehelp@cs.ucsd.edu about this same request retain "[csehelp #12345]:" in the subject line. This will happen automatically for you when you reply. The subject (in most mail programs) would become: Subject: Re: [csehelp #12345]: I need some help All correspondence from CSEHelp staff members will also contain your Ticket Number in the subject line. If you happen to have more than one issue open at a time this can help you keep track of the different threads.
The most common methods of connecting to our machines is to use scp or sftp for file transfers, or ssh for remote logins. We do not allow rsh or telnet.
If you want a shell login in which to work on files in your home directory, read mail, and so on, use ssh to connect to csegrad.ucsd.edu. Later on, you may be using APE machines or machines affiliated with a specific lab. In those cases, as long as the machine is a csehelp-administered machine, your csegrad home directory will still be available as "/home/<username>"
Microsoft service ports (135-139, 445, and 1433) are blocked at the campus border. To connect to these ports on campus machines from outside, you need to use the campus VPN. This does *not* apply to users using the campus dialin lines.
Campus VPN documentation and signup forms
The department uses SAMBA to provide a mechanism for sharing files between UNIX machines and Windows machines. Documentation is available. For samba access, you'll need a Windows account. These are given on an as-needed basis. Please send a request to csehelp@cs.ucsd.edu for access.
You can ssh into a department machine (e.g. csegrad.ucsd.edu) and run unix mail, mailx, or pine at the command line to read mail. We also support imap, secure imap, and apop connection protocols. If you are running a mail client like Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora (and others of that ilk), set your incoming mail server to csegrad.ucsd.edu.
If you want to use the apop mail protocol, you'll need to ssh to csegrad and run the
% popauth command to set up your password. Documentation is available.
Short answer: use wireless.
In some cases, the department will give you a fixed ip address or a wired dhcp address. In these cases, we can configure one of the ethernet jacks on a wall plate in your office or seating area for you to use. In general, we discourage fixed ip addresses because: - they are less flexible
- network ports need to be configured and dedicated to that machine
- they tend to be underused or abandoned and thus wasted
- we are currently running very low on available addresses in our address space
Generally, if you have to have a fixed ip address, you need to affiliate yourself with a professor/lab and then request an address. Note: In all cases, contact csehelp before connecting your machine to a network. If you don't, in some cases campus network operations may detect your machine and block its ethernet address without your (or csehelp's) knowledge, and this can be difficult to track down.
Also, what you really really really shouldn't do is disconnect a csehelp-managed machine in a lab and plug in your own machine to that port. This causes automated maintenance to go bad, problem notifications to fire off (to which we have to deal with) and so on. Please don't.
We strongly recommend that you use wireless.
The best way to use your own machine on campus networks is to equip it with a wireless card and use the campus wireless network. This network has dynamic addressing, so you don't need to have an ip address prior to use.
Campus Network Operations rather than CSEhelp actually maintains the wireless network, even within our own building. Anyone with a campus account (this includes all grad students) is allowed to set up a wireless account. More info can be found here:
Use your web browser to try to connect to any web page. If you are instead redirected to a login page, you need to enter your campus username and password. Once done, you should be able to make other connections with other services as well.
Graduate students, faculty, staff, and postdocs all receive disk space on the department's web server, www.cse.ucsd.edu. Your files are located under
/cse/htdocs/users/<username>
This file path is available on any CSEHelp-administered machine. Note that the machine itself is not called "cs", despite the pathname. To external users connecting to the server, the path will simply be:
www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/<username>
You can also use the "~" shortcut to the directory:
www.cse.ucsd.edu/~<username>
To create a web page, just start by creating your own index.html file and putting it there.
Windows accounts are given on an as needed basis. If you need to access CSE resources from Windows please contact CSEhelp for an account.
We back up all of the UNIX home directories and system mail spools on csegrad. If you want to make sure a document gets backed up the best thing to do is to put it in your home directory.
CSEHelp supported machines are already setup to print to all departmental printers. All you have to do is set the PRINTER variable in your environment to the printer you want to print to. Here's an example on how to do this for tcsh.
setenv PRINTER <printername>
export PRINTER
lp <filename>
See here for help on printing from user-supported machines.
The department unix password database contains both your password and what is called your "finger information". This is the information returned by the
% finger username@cs command. This information may include your real name, your office information, etc. To change your password, on any CSEHelp-administered Solaris or Linux machine type:
% passwd To change your "finger information", on any CSEHelp-administered Solaris or Linux machine, type:
% ldapchfn To change the shell you get when you log in, type:
% ldapchsh You will be prompted for your unix password. It will then show you your current shell, and ask you what you'd like the new one to be. You can use any of the shells listed in the file /etc/shells, available on any CSEHelp-supported linux or solaris machine. Note that the set of allowed shells may be different on linux vs.solaris machines. If you want your account to work smoothly on both, make sure to choose a shell that is allowed on both types of system.
The University (or by extension, the CSE department) cannot actually prevent spam from getting to your account. Keeping any email from getting to our users is contrary to policies limiting campus censorship, including the University's Electronic Communications Policy.
However, the department does do analysis on incoming mail and inserts a header with a score indicating how "spammy" each message appears to be. You can then filter on that header and do whatever you want, based on that header (delete it directly, save it to a "potential spam" folder, etc). Details on this can be found on our spam page.
We have also configured several of our higher-traffic internal mail lists so that messages from addresses outside the department are blocked. This cuts down on most spam to those lists, but since a small percentage of spam is forged to appear to be originating inside the department, some will still get through.
If you receive email that is objectionable, abusive, or threatening beyond the bounds of "normal" spam, please save the email and forward it and all headers to csehelp@cs.ucsd.edu.
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Computing FAQ
