Tips for Using Your Alpha account

Turning off mail notification

What, exactly, is mail notification? Simply put, each time someone sends you an e-mail message while you are logged in, the system will broadcast a message showing who the message is from and its subject line. This is different from PINE's notification, which also notifies when you are using it that you have received a message. Notice that there are two types of notification -- system notification and PINE notification. PINE checks every 2 minutes for new messages and displays a prompt at the bottom of the PINE screen. Alpha's operating system, however, sends its notifications no matter which programs you are using at the time. Also, the system's message is a broadcast message and it will display over top of other text on your screen, causing some confusion. If you want to disable the operating system's notification method:

  1. From the Alpha Main Menu, select Alpha Utility menu.
  2. On the Utility menu, select Shell to a UNIX prompt.
  3. To temporarily disable system notification, at the prompt, type biff n and press <Return>.
    4. Note: If you want to just see what your notification is set for, just type biff and press <Return>.

The above instructions will only set the notification method temporarily -- during just this login session. If you wish to permanently disable system mail notification, you must edit your .login file:

  1. At the UNIX prompt, type pico .login and press <Return>.
  2. You can either place a # sign in front of the command line /usr/bin/biff y (which will treat the text as a comment only, not a command) or you may delete that command line entirely. At first, you may wish to just comment the command out in case you should change your mind later on down the road. Then you won't have to remember what the initial command was!
  3. Save your newly edited .login file by pressing <Ctrl-x>.
  4. Answer Yes when asked if you wish to save the modified buffer, then just press <Return> to keep the filename (.login) provided.
To read online help about the biff command, shell to the UNIX prompt and type man biff and press <Return>.

Understanding disk quotas

There are literally hundreds of accounts on the Alpha computer. Each year, accounts are created for incoming freshmen, not to mention the accounts for sophomores, juniors and seniors. Most college employees also have Alpha accounts, too. Because we all share this one computing resource, and to ensure there is enough room for everyone to store files, we enforce quotas.

Your quota is the amount of disk space on Alpha that you are allowed to use to store files. "I don't have any files," you may say. Every time people send you e-mail messages, this takes up a small portion of your quota. If you routinely keep your mail messages, or subscribe to discussion groups and never delete messages, more and more of your quota is being consumed. Also, if you have a personal web page, this has the potential to really eat up disk space, depending on how much information you put online.  One of the biggest culprits eating up disk space can be downloading and saving file attachments from email on Alpha.  (We offer a separate class on file attachments in the main Alpha class listing.)

At any rate, you may view the status of your quota at any time:

  1. From the Alpha Main Menu, select Alpha Utility menu.
  2. On the Utility menu, select View your disk utilization and quota. You will see several pieces of information, explained below. Column headings not mentioned below are not used on our system and may be disregarded.
Filesystem The directory system where your individual directory resides.
Blocks The amount of space you have used up of your quota. The blocks are displayed in kilobytes, so 10485 blocks would be a little over 10MB. If you see an asterisk (*), this means you are in an over-quota state. Alpha recognizes you as being over quota if you are within 10% of your Quota figure. An over-quota message would be seen by anyone who would send you e-mail.
Quota The amount of space you have been authorized to use on Alpha, also known as your softquota. When you have exceeded your Quota figure, anything you are currently working on can be saved, and e-mail sent to you may be received for as long as your Grace period indicates (see Grace, below), as long as you do not exceed your Limit amount (see Limit, below).
Limit Your hardquota, which includes a little "breathing space" for times when you unknowingly exceed your Quota. If you ignore your over-quota state long enough to reach your Limit, all e-mail being sent to you will bounce back to the sender and will not be received in your account! You will also not be able to save any new files. Until your ultimate Limit is reached, though, you will still be able to save files and receive e-mail, until the Grace period expires. If anyone sends you e-mail while your Limit is in force, the sender will see a warning message, something like "e1: warning, user disk quota exceeded," but their e-mail will be sent to the recipient.
Grace When you have exceeded your Limit, this is the number of days you have to clean up your files. If you do not get yourself under Quota by that time, you will no longer be able to save files or receive e-mail. Any e-mail sent to you will automatically bounce back to the sender. They will see a message that states "e1: warning, user disk quota exceeded write failed, user disk quota exceeded too long."

To read online help about the vquota command, shell to the UNIX prompt and type man vquota and press <Return>.

Cleaning up your account

Viewing a list of all the files in your Alpha account

When you select Shell to a UNIX prompt from the Alpha Utility menu, you may type one of the following commands and press <Return> to get a listing of all the files you have:
 
ls Displays a list showing just the filenames.
ls -s Displays a list showing filenames and file sizes.
ls -al Displays a list showing filename, file size and date of creation or last modification.
Note:  When you use the commands above, you may have so many files that some scroll off the computer screen.  To prevent this, you may add an option to the "ls" command that will pause the display of filenames on a screen-by-screen basis.  After each of the above commands, add | more and press <Return>.  (The vertical bar character  appears when you hold down the <Shift> key and press the <Backslash> key.)  After the first screen is displayed, press the <Spacebar> to view the next screen of filenames. 

Examples:

ls | more
ls -s | more
ls -al | more

What are all these files with periods in front of them?

When you view your list of files you will see some files begin with a period, such as .login or .addressbook.  These are important system-related files which, if you delete, will impact the way your account works.  For instance, the .login file controls various commands which are activated when you log into your Alpha account.  The .addressbook file is your PINE personal address book, so if you delete this file, kiss your saved email addresses goodbye.  As a general rule, do not delete any files which have a period in front of the name!

Removing mail messages

  • Simply log into your email program and delete these messages from your account.
  • Remember to either "expunge" deleted messages (PINE) or "compact this folder" or "empty trash" (Netscape Messenger).
  • If you are subscribed to any email discussion lists, you may wish to unsubscribe from the list over summer, for instance, if you will not be checking into your Dickinson email account.

Deleting previously-saved but now unwanted file attachments

    1. From the Alpha Main Menu, select Alpha Utility menu.
    2. On the next menu, select Shell to a UNIX prompt.
    3. At your home directory prompt, type ls and press <Return> to display a list of files in your account.
    4. To delete a file type rm -e filename then press <Return> (ex: rm -e finances.wk4). The "-e" in the command will display a verification message that the file is being removed from your account.
      5. Note: Several files may be deleted with one command by appending a space and typing another filename (ex: rm -e finances.wk4 budget.wk4 papertmp.doc).
    5. At the home directory prompt, type exit and press <Return> to get back into the Alpha Utility menu.
    6. Select Return to Main Menu to get back to the Alpha Main Menu.

    Cleaning up your public_html directory (web pages)

    1. From the Alpha Main Menu, select Alpha Utility menu.
    2. On the next menu, select Shell to a UNIX prompt.
    3. You will see a prompt for your home directory on Alpha, however, you must switch into your public_html directory.  To do this, type cd public_html and press <Return>.  You will now see a new prompt (i.e., /s2/2001/public_html).
    4. Type ls and press <Return> to display a list of files in your web directory.
    5. To delete a file type rm -e filename then press <Return> (ex: rm -e mypage.html). The "-e" in the command will display a verification message that the file is being removed from your account.
      6. Note: Several files may be deleted with one command by appending a space and typing another filename (ex: rm -e mypage.html photo.jpg bluecube.gif).
    6. When finished, simply type exit and press <Return> to get back into the Alpha Utility menu.
    7. Select Return to Main Menu to get back to the Alpha Main Menu.

Renaming Files

Sometimes you may want to change the name of a file.  This is a fairly simple process, however, there is no "rename" command in UNIX.  Instead, you will use the "move" command to rename a file from its current name to a new name.

  1. From the Alpha Main Menu, select Alpha Utility menu.
  2. On the next menu, select Shell to a UNIX prompt.
  3. At your home directory prompt, type ls and press <Return> to display a list of files in your account.
  4. To rename a file type mv oldfilename newfilename then press <Return> (ex: mv index.html oldindex.html).

Using "Talk"

Talk is a method used to communicate "live" (or interactively) with another user who is logged into Dickinson's Alpha computer or a computer system elsewhere, for that matter. The only real requirement is both users must currently be logged into their respective systems.

To initiate a Talk session:

  1. From the Alpha Main Menu, select Alpha Utility menu.
  2. On the Utility menu, select Shell to a UNIX prompt.
  3. At the UNIX prompt, type mesg and press <Return> to see whether or not your account is enabled to receive messages. If you see the response is yes, then you're all set. If you see is no, then type mesg y and press <Return>. Keep in mind that the person with whom you are trying to talk may have their mesg option set to "no!" In this case, you will see a message that states "Your party is refusing messages."
  4. To establish a Talk session, at the UNIX prompt type talk usernameand press <Return> (where "username" is a valid internet address, such as talk smith@dickinson.edu or talk harris@aol.com).
  5. Your screen will split in half and display [Waiting for your party to respond] in the upper right-hand corner. When they respond, you will see [Connection established]. Simply begin typing to each other on the screen.
  6. To end a talk session, press <Ctrl-c>. If you were the first one to end the session, you will see [Connection closing. Exiting]. If the other party ended the session, you will see [Connection closed. Interrupt to exit...].

To respond to a Talk request:

  1. When someone is attempting to Talk with you on Alpha, you will see:
    2. Message from Talk_Daemon@alpha.dickinson.edu at 14:46 ...
     
    talk: connection requested by user@host
     
    talk: respond with: talk username@host

      To respond, enter the command talk username@host (where username@host is the other party's internet address.
To read online help about the talk command, shell to the UNIX prompt and type man talk and press <Return>.