Author: harry

Drop-in Lab

harry
As of Nov 2019, the Drop-in Lab has been moved to CS 4.02 (next to the lifts)

The Drop-in Lab (previously knows as the MSc Lab is located at CS 4.02, in the Peter Landin building (Computer Science) next to the lifts. It’s an ‘Open-Access‘ Student lab, which means that all EECS students and staff can use the lab at any time (subject to the building’s opening-closing schedule).

Equipment

The School provides 27 Desktops in the Lab space, all of them come with Nvidia Quadro P200 GPU cards. They are setup as EECS Student Desktops, with the same OS and same environment as the rest of the Student desktops in EECS.

Lab Qty Model CPU RAM GPU
Drop-in Lab 27 Dell Precision 3620 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz 16 GB RAM Nvidia Quadro 2000 (Pascal)

Student Labs

harry

Lab Spaces

As of May 2019, the Faculty of Science & Engineering operates the following Student Labs. The IT equipment, OS and software are managed by EECS Systems:

Lab Location Floor Workstations Map (JPG)
ITL Ground ITL Ground level 102
ITL Middle ITL 1st Floor 98
ITL Top ITL 2nd Floor 90
Electonics Lab (South) Engineering Building 3rd Floor 48  
Electonics Lab (North) EngineeringBuilding 3rd Floor 48
4.02 Lab Computer Science 4.02 4th Floor 27
IoC Lab (Institute of Coding)
 Eng B10 Basement 50
QB 202 Queen’s Building 202 2nd Floor 84

NB QB 202 will be a shared teaching space with SEF.

Opening hours

The Opening hours are subject to change via email notifications
Lab Days Hours
ITL (Scheduled Labs) Mon – Fri 09:00 – 18:00
ITL Open Access

Mon – Fri

Sat – Sun

18:00 – 23:00

08:00 – 23:00
Electronics Lab Mon – Fri 09:00 – 17:00
4.02 Lab TBA TBA
IoC Lab TBA TBA
QB 202 TBA TBA

Timetabling

Timetabled laboratory sessions allocate Virtual Lab spaces to a Course Module  for a period of time. During the sessions, only the students enrolled on the appropriate Course Module and staff will be allowed to login.

Outside of the laboratory sessions, the following permissions will apply:

Year Access (out-of-hours)
Msc ITL 2nd Floor , Drop-in Lab
4th year ITL {Ground, 1st Floor, 2nd Floor}, Drop-in Lab
3rd year ITL {Ground, 1st Floor, 2nd Floor}
2nd year ITL {Ground, 1st Floor}
1st year ITL {Ground, 1st Floor}

 

Desktops

Lab Qty Model CPU RAM GPU
ITL Ground 102 Dell OptiPlex 9030 AIO 3.2GHz Intel Haswell Core i7 16 GB RAM –
ITL Middle 63 Dell OptiPlex 9030 AIO 3.2GHz Intel Haswell Core i7 16 GB RAM –
35 Dell OptiPlex 7440 AIO 3.4GHz Intel Skylake Core i7 16 GB RAM –
ITL Top 20 Dell OptiPlex 9030 AIO 3.2GHz Intel Haswell Core i7 16 GB RAM –
70 Dell Precision 3620 4.2GHz Intel Kaby Lake Core i7 16 GB RAM Nvidia Quadro p2000 (Pascal)
Electronics Lab 96 Dell OptiPlex 7460 AIO 3.2GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB RAM –
Drop-in Lab 27 Dell Precision 3620 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz 16 GB RAM Nvidia Quadro P2000 (Pascal)
IoC Lab 50 Dell Precision 3630 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8500 CPU @ 3.00GHz 16 GB RAM Nvidia Quadro P2000 (Pascal)

Wi-Fi access

Wi-Fi (Eduroam) is available throughout the building. Check the ITS Wi-Fi Guide how to connect to Eduroam.

Printers

See Student Printing

Lab Software

See also the EECS Software page and Systems FAQ (Software and Licensing).

Temporary account

harry

We provide short-term accounts, also known as ‘ODL accounts‘,  for special arrangements and events, like Programming Competitions, Open-days, etc. These accounts are valid for 1 or

To request such an account, the Host of the event should raise a Helpdesk Ticket with the following details:

  • Name of the event
  • Number of temporary accounts
  • Duration dates
  • Location of event

We strongly suggest that the Host must test at least a few random accounts before the event takes place to make sure that everything works as expected.

Guest Account

harry

Guest accounts can be created under certain circumstances, for example visiting Academics, Research Assistants, contractors working for a certain period of time, etc.

Guest accounts must be requested officially, by filling a “Guest User” form at the CS Reception CS300. The form should be then brought to EECS Systems CS327.

Guest Accounts, by default, will be members of their host’s Research Group. If additional permissions are required for the guest to access certain resources in EECS, please raise a Helpdesk Ticket with any relevant information.

Personal Webpages

harry

All students and staff members can create their personal website in their home directory, which can be publicly visible.

public_html folder

Any user that wants to quickly create a publicly available personal web page, they can do so by creating a public_html or a local_html folder in their home directory.

Users MUST set the right permissions for their public_html folder in Linux, in order to get displayed on the browser.

The folders must be ‘executable’ by the ‘other’ and the files inside the public_html folder must be at least ‘readable’ by the ‘other’
The persmissions should be as bellow:

 

Folder name Permissions (rwx)
home dir (e.g. /homes/jdoe123)  o+x  (e.g. drwx-----x)
/homes/jdoe123/public_html  o+x (e.g. drwx-----x)
/homes/jdoe123/local_html  o+x (e.g. drwx-----x)
/homes/jdoe123/public_html/index.html  o+r (e.g. drwx-----r)

It should look like this:

Path: ~/public_html

jdoe123@frank ~ $ ls -lha ~/public_html/
total 28K
drwx---r-x.   3 jdoe123 staffphdguest 4.0K Apr  8 11:07 .
drwx--x--x. 154 jdoe123 staffphdguest  12K Apr 30 15:03 ..
-rw-r--r--.   1 jdoe123 staffphdguest   23 Mar  7  2017 .htaccess
-rw-r--r--.   1   jdoe123 staffphdguest  929 Jan 12  2018 index.html

Path: H:\public_html

Path: smb://frank.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/USERNAME

 

URL

The URL to access someone’s personal website, is the URL for the EECS website, folloed by the ~ symbol and the user’s EECS username, for example:

  • http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~jdoe123/
  • http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/localuser/~jdoe123/

 

 

The server has been set up so that it will fail to serve any files pointed to by, for example, symbolic links that point out of the public or local directories. When you want to link to other documents, your personal pages should contain complete URLs for them.

So as an example if a request is made for:

"http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~leonardo/bike_stuff/bikes.html"

(this does not exist!) then it would serve the document ~leonardo/public_html/bike_stuff/bikes.html. If the URL was http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~leonardo/bike_stuff then if the file index.html exists in the directory then this is served. As a department, we have standardised on using index.html.

Uploading to your personal pages

You can access your home directory remotely. scp is often a convenient way to update your personal web pages (copy the files to your public_html directory in the obvious way). See the remote access web pagesfor more information.

Letting People Know About Your Personal Page

At present the URL http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/people gives a list of the staff and PhDs in the department. This is generated from a user database – if you’ve entered a home page URL via the Intranet web details editor it will be shown there.

Web Policies

harry

Web Policy

Anyone in the School can have their own personal pages; HoDs are nominally responsible for all web pages produced by members of their departments.

Privacy Policy: Cookies

The EECS intranets set cookies on your web browser for the following purposes:

  • To implement “portal” features, customising your experience of the web site, e.g. as on your Landing Page.
  • To control access to particular resources depending on your role or roles in the School.

The QMUL idcheck authentication page sets a College-wide cookie that identifies you by IP address and login name. The EECS web sites set additional cookies for session control. No third-party (non-QM) cookie is set or accessed.

Environment modules

harry

Environment modules allow developers (and students) to change the necessary environment paths in a user’s Shell in order to use a particular version of a software with the necessary libraries required (among other things). That means, for example, that when the default java version on the system is 1.7, you can load the env. module for Java 1.8 with 1 simple command and you can start using Java 1.8 for your project.

Both research and student desktops and servers have a large number of environment modules available for usage. Student desktops will have for the new academic semester a bigger collection of modules to use.

How-to

To list all the available modules, run:

 $ module avail

To show what the module will change in the user’s environment, type:

$ module show MODULE_NAME

To load an environment module, type:

$ module load MODULE_NAME

To list the currently enabled modules, type:

$ module list

To unload a module, type:

$ module unload MODULE_NAME

To unload ALL active modules, type:

$ module purge

 

Desktop Computers

harry

EECS provides certain types of Desktops for Teaching and Research purposes. All Student desktops are Managed. Most of the PhD desktops and all of the Staff Desktops are also Managed. A number of PhD students can be provided with Self-Managed Desktops for their research.

Managed Desktops

“Managed Desktops” means that the desktops are pre-installed with Windows and Linux, directly connected to EECS Services (Network. Fileserver, Printers, etc), daily updated with the latest security patches, on the trusted Managed network and the software deployment is managed by the EECS Systems team.

Users do not have administrator rights, and for software/packages installation they must raise a relevant Request.

Student and staff desktops are fully managed, on the student network, with a great variety of software. Users can login using only their EECS username and password.

We also provide MacOS X (mainly for MAT students and some academics).

Dual-boot

EECS Managed desktops are dual-boot systems running the latest versions of CentOS and Windows OS.

Managed Desktops boot from the network over PXE. During that stage, the desktop requests an IP address from a DHCP server. Then a blue PXE screen lets you choose which Operating System (Windows/Linux)you would like to boot from.

The following video shows the initial PXE-boot sequence in EECS:

Home Folder

During login, the users will find their home folder mounted on their Managed Desktop. In Windows it’s the H: drive and in Linux it’s the /homes/EECS_USERNAME.The home folder is exported from a central Fileserver, which means that the home directory will be available in every EECS Managed Desktop and server the users login into

All data saved in the Home Folder are also included in the EECS Backups.

 

Domains

Currently there are two domains in EECS, isolating Teaching and Research resources.

  • STUDENT (student.eecs.qmul.ac.uk) : This is the Student domain, all Student desktops and servers in this domain are isolated and secured from the rest of the networks and the outside world.
  • RESEARCH (eecs.qmul.ac.uk / research.eecs.qmul.ac.uk): This is the Staff/PhD/Research domain. All Staff/PhD Desktops  and servers are isolated and protected from the rest of the networks and the outside world. All devices inside this domain are considered as ‘trusted’ since they are fully managed.

Any device that needs access resources inside these domains, they must use the ‘login-servers’ or each network.

 

Operating Systems

Windows

Windows 10.1 is installed in all EECS Managed desktops for Students and Staff/PhD members. Users can login using only their EECS accounts.

The managed Windows systems use cross-platform software as far as possible so that you can access your email, files etc as conveniently under Linux and MacOS as you can under Windows.

When you log into Windows for the first time, it will take a few minutes to build the Windows user’s profile, this is normal.

 

Linux

The latest version of CentOS is also installed in all EECS Managed Desktops, updated daily. The default desktop environment is GNOME, but KDE and Xfce can be provided after a Request.

A large variety of applications, IDEs, editors, libraries etc is installed, with additional software resources available from the /import/linux software share as well as in the form of environment modules.

Requests for additional software can be raised via Helpdesk Ticket

 

MacOS X

A number of MacOS X desktops are also available for the MAT students.

 

Self-Managed Desktops

Desktops provided by the School for PhD students can be self-managed. That means that they are not pre-installed, configured, fully managed and supported by EECS Systems, but the users are fully responsible for installing their own OS, software and setup everything else required  for their research. Users have administrator privileges in these devices.

Self-managed desktops are considered as less-trusted devices, and are connected to a separate network. EECS services like printing, group shares, etc are not directly accessible by these devices, but the users can connect to all EECS services they are entitled to by following the relevant guides in our Support Pages.

Any data saved into self-managed desktops are not included in EECS Backups, therefore users are responsible for backing up their research data.

 

IT Regulation

Use of EECS Computers is subject to subject to the University’s IT regulations, as the source of those regulations moves around a lot we hold a copy here.