For those students which prefer to work from their own machines, we have two Dell PowerEdge Dual-Processor SC1425 servers (3.0GHz/P4/1GB) available for remote login. Their hostnames are as follows.
vlsifarm-01.mit.edu vlsifarm-02.mit.edu
These machines run standard Athena/Linux and are only available to students who are currently registered for the course. User your Athena username and password to gain access to the servers. To determine the current load on one of the servers, log into it and use the "w" command. This will show you who is currently using the machine and the first line indicates the average system load for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes. If the machines are very busy (load averages above 3) you will need to make use of the 38-301 computing lab or one of the public Athena clusters.
Using the Vlsifarms from a Linux Machine
Linux distributions almost always include a ssh client and X-windows server, so it should be relatively easy to use the vlsifarms. Simply log into one of the servers using the "ssh" command. To check that X-windows is working execute "xcalc" and verify that the simple X-windows calculator appears. You may also want to setup an AFS client on your machine so that you can directly access the content in the 6.375 course locker and in your Athena home directory. This enables you to use your favorite local text editor instead of running emacs on the vlsifarm over ssh (which can sometimes be a bit slow). The following instructions specify how to setup AFS for a redhat linux box.
- Download the following files from www.openafs.org.
- openafs-1.2.13-fc1.0.1.i386.rpm openafs-client-1.2.13-fc1.0.1.i386.rpm openafs-kernel-1.2.13-fc1.0.1.i386.rpm openafs-krb5-1.2.13-fc1.0.1.i386.rpm