Computer Science Lab

The Computer Science Laboratory (aka UNIX-Lab) is located in Room 127 of the Burchard Building and offers students access to almost 30 workstations running NetBSD, a free, secure, and highly portable UNIX-like operating system. These workstations all have an identical configuration, containing all of the tools required by students to perform all of their various tasks, including but not limited to webbrowsing, email, and homework assignments. Each students $HOME is mounted via NFS from the main file server, allowing the users to access their profile from any of the workstations. All of the machines in the CS-Lab allow remote access through SSH under the common name nimbus.cs.stevens.edu. The SSH fingerprints for these machines are available in this file.

An idential machine named shell.cs.stevens.edu is also available to provide ssh access in case there is a problem with the multi-homed DNS for nimbus.cs.stevens.edu.

HARDWARE

All workstations consist of up to date hardware, which is upgraded at the very least every 3 years. As of 2006-02-02, most machines are still based on x86 processors (AMD Athlons, mostly) with plans to upgrade to adm64 bit processors over the coming year.

SOFTWARE

As part of the Department of Computer Science, the lab serves as the ideal environment for students to work on their homework assignments -- through the use of an Operating System that puts emphasis on portable and correct implementations of the various open standards, students learn to write proper code, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of a powerful UNIX-like environment. Some of the software related to the various classes offered at Stevens and otherwise is listed below:

Naturally, a lot more that just the software listed here is installed on the machines, including all common UNIX tools such as the various shells, sed, awk, emacs, vi etc. For a complete listing of all currently installed software please see this page; for a complete listing with longer descriptions, refer to this page.

In addition, we maintain a Linux server in order to accomodate Linux-specific needs of faculty and students. This server also offers access to the PostgreSQL database, and is called heineken. it runs a modified version of Debian GNU/Linux.

Finally, we have several desktop environments and window managers installed to allow students to customize their environment to their personal preferences. Below you will find a few screenshots, click on the image to view a larger version:

Screenshot	Environment
	This is just a screenshot of our XDM Login Manager, sporting the BSD Daemon with the Stevens Logo.
	A desktop using the Blackbox Window Manager, showing various xterms, one with mutt, demonstrating nice threading.
	A gnome-session in action, showing the calendar, balsa's initial dialog and a menu.
	Icewm showing the Gimp and Acroread.
	KDE demonstrating how easy it is to view even MS PowerPoint slides. Here we see the slides Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested for presenting -- they are displayed using OpenOffice.org. In the background is Konqueror, KWord and KSpread.
	A simple mwm screenshot
	A simple twm screenshot -- this is what the default desktop looks like when a student logs in for the first time.
	WindowMaker showing Mozilla and XEmacs as well as a transparent rxvt.

Please see the CS IT web site for details and additional documentation.