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Questions and Answers from the Computing Helpdesk

Collected by the IT/User Support Team

Nicole Crémel (Editor) , IT/User Support


Abstract

This is a collection of Questions & Answers that have been treated by the Computing Helpdesk managed by the User Support group.

N.B. The number in parentheses refers to its relative numbering in the User Support "Question-Answer" database, at URL:
http://cern.ch/consult/qa/NNN
where NNN is the problem identifier (number).


Some History

The "Questions and Answers from the Computing Helpdesk" is a regular section in the CNL that first appeared 6 years ago, in CNL 219( January - March 1995). At that time the title was still "Questions and Answers from the UCO". It was renamed in CNL 233 (October - December 1998), when the "Computing Helpdesk" was officially announced as a one-desk, one-address, one-number for users, with its new and simple telephone number (78888) and e-mail address (Helpdesk@cern.ch), replacing the defunct (but well-known and sometimes regretted by users) "User Consultancy Office" (see related article in CNL 233).

The idea to introduce such a section in the CERN CNL originally came from browsing the DESY NewsLetter (their CNL equivalent). Also, with the increasing number and diversity of user queries coming to the Helpdesk, it seemed a good idea to print regularly some of the "frequently asked" questions, in the hope of anticipating some small (and known) problems that users may experience (and for which we can already provide a solution).

 


PC Support  -  

(Hannes Schwarzbauer  IT/User Support)

Question (QA 367)   - Inaccessible servers with W2000

Ever since the migration of some home servers to W2000 I encounter a strange phenomenon on my NT computer:

I usually use the PC 'phonebook' to map someone else's home directory, in order to access his public folder. However, sometimes one W2000 home server is unreachable (i.e. asks me for a password) whereas I can perfectly display others.

Even stranger, some of my colleagues succeed in accessing home servers, some don't.

Answer   -   Since the migration certain access mechanisms have changed:

If one tries to access someone's home directory via the phonebook and then maps it, internally the account GUEST is used. This account is not valid anymore for W2000, so the user can't access this server and has to logout/re-login.

Therefore the only valid method to access someone else's directory is to go from the Start menu into Run and type the account there, e.g.:
\\srv1_home\joepublic

(Note that this problem will disappear with the introduction of NICE2000).

Question (QA 374)   - Access 2000 to Access 97 conversion

I was sent an Access 2000 database which I cannot read under the NICE Access 97 version. Is there a possibility to convert?

Answer   -   Because of the change in the file format, you cannot open an Access 2000 database in any previous version of Access. You must convert it to Access 97 like this:
 Tools - database utilities - convert database -  
 to prior access database version. 
Type a new name for the database and save it.

Please note:

  • you cannot convert a member of a replica set to an earlier version of Access.
  • module code that relies on Access 2000 add-ins or libraries (such as ADO 2.1 or later) needs to be modified.
  • a database converted to Access 97 loses:
    • data access pages. There is no workaround for this.
    • Unicode support
    • support for the decimal data type
    • support for ADO. You must use DAO or RDO instead.

Question (QA 385)   - FTP to NICE from outside CERN

How can I "ftp" to NICE from outside CERN?

Answer   -   General access to files from outside CERN is not supported. However, all new home servers (CERNHOME01 -> 08) have an incoming access, so that users can use "ftp", like this (example for CERNHOME01):

ftp cernhome01.cern.ch
(login with NICE account name and password)

If you don't know your home directory server, consult the NICE phonebook (type your name, then click on 'more info'), or, if you cannot do it, contact the helpdesk: helpdesk@cern.ch (tel. +41/22/767.8888)

Question (QA 401)   - Printing from a NON-CERN (visitors) W2000 portable

Is there a way to print quickly without connecting to the CERN/NICE domain? (E.g. when using a Windows 2000 portable PC).

Answer   -   The Printing Package does it all for you. You can just down-load the client package in FTP mode from the following site:
   http://cern.ch/printpackage 
Go to the User's Guide and down-load the FTP Mode self-extracting installer for Windows 2000, called SetupFTPW2K.exe

Running this program as Local Administrator will install the package and create an icon in the system tray. In this mode you do NOT need to be connected to the CERN domain.

Question (QA 411)   - SQL*Loader on NICE

Is SQL* Loader available on NICE? If yes, how do I invoke it?

Answer   -   There are two ways to access SQL* Loader on NICE:
  1. From a normal MS-DOS windows, you can call sqlldr, sqlldr73 or sqlldr80 (it depends on the target database version).
  2. In the Oracle Basics menu (Start - Database Management - Oracle Basics), you find an icon called Oracle Data Manager. You run that, and you have Export, Import and Loader in the same tool.

Question (QA 427)   - Office 2000 - where have my menus gone to?

Office 2000 sometimes seems to lose some bits of the menus I was used to get on Office 97. For example, in Word 2000, my 'Format' menu only shows 2 entries - where are the others?

Answer   -   The entries in this and other menus are not lost, they are only hidden. If you move your cursor over the 'double-down' arrows, they reappear.

Microsoft programmers thought this would make life easier for users, as most of them only use a small percentage of all possibilities the items contain. But indeed others get irritated by this behaviour and feel that a quick and efficient usage of Office 2000 is not possible.

To overcome this, here is the recipe:
Within Word, click on 'tools', then 'customize'. In the Options tab, un-tick 'menus show recently used commands first'.

All menus are now back alive and shown. And not only for Word, this also 'reactivates' them for the rest of the Office 2000 package, like Excel, Powerpoint etc...

Question (QA 468)   - W2000 portable DHCP connection to CERN domain

I have connected my portable PC (running Windows 2000) to a special CERN DHCP socket foreseen for portables, but I cannot access the CERN domain or see any of its applications.

Answer   -   Computers need to be registered correctly in LANDB for Windows 2000 to work and deploy applications. In this case, the computer had not been registered as portable from the network database.

You can check your computer configuration at http://winservices.web.cern.ch: select then "Computer account status", which will display in red incorrect settings.

The PC has to be registered correctly and you will have to wait for the active directory synchronisation to complete.

Question (QA 472)   - Restricted login on PCs

Is there a possibility to restrict user logins to certain PC's, so that not everyone can login to a given PC?

Answer   -   We cannot centrally restrict users to login on certain machines. This was previously possible with Netware on W95, but it is not anymore possible on WNT and W2000.

However, on NT, you can still do that locally, by selecting:

 Start - Programs - Administrative Tools - User Manager 
Then select the menu:
 -> Policies -> User Rights... 
choose "Log on Locally" in the drop-down list for the rights, remove "Everyone" from the list below, and add the account(s) you want to be able to login to this PC.

 


UNIX Support  -  

(Nicole Crémel and Roger Woolnough  IT/User Support)

Question (QA 349)   - LSF requests on Solaris and Linux

Is it possible to select on which architecture some LSF request will be executed (e.g. in the CMS cluster)?

Answer   -   In the LSF CMS (Solaris/Linux) cluster, all requests submitted from cms.wgs are only going to Solaris nodes. In the same way, all requests submitted from cmslx.wgs are only going to Linux ones.

It is possible to force LSF requests to be executed in another type of architecture, with the option '-R solaris' or '-R linux' (or even '-R hpux') in the bsub command line.

N.B. All requests issued from hpplus (to zh_??? queues) are targeted to run in shift42. To force them to run under Solaris systems, the option '-R solaris' has to be used (or '-R linux') to get them in Linux systems.

Question (QA 352)   - Fortran and "hepf77" command on Linux

Is the "hepf77" command available on Linux ?

Answer   -   The port for this command was done in 1999 and it has been available since at least February 2000. It provides easy portable access to g77, the default CERN supported Fortran 77 compiler.

Please note that using this hepf77 command together with the cernlib command is the standard way to link an application calling CERNLIB on all central platforms at CERN (e.g. RSPLUS, HPPLUS, DXPLUS and more recently LXPLUS), to avoid any "undefined" reference (and setting the correct flags and options). E.g. if you want to link an application psimple.f with PACKLIB, just type:

       hepf77 -o psimple psimple.f `cernlib packlib` 
(Be careful with the back quotes, standard UNIX feature!)
This will produce an executable file psimple.

Question (QA 362)   - Access to Software repository (e.g. GNU tool)

I would like to install locally on my UNIX workstation a tool which is available in ASIS. Where can I get this tool ?

Answer   -   All CERN software which are "public domain" (like the GNU tools) are available from the asisftp server, at URL:
 ftp://asisftp.cern.ch 

Notes: GNU and public domain software are stored under the sub-directory pub (ftp://asisftp.cern.ch/pub). ASIS software is access free (unprotected access).

Question (QA 368)   - X11 resources file

What is the default resources file for X11 (X-windows), as set by the HEPiX X11 scripts at CERN ?

Answer   -   To see the current resources of your X server, just type:
  xrdb -q 
In order to see the resources that the HEPiX scripts used the last time you logged in, look at:
  ~/.hepix/generated_xresources. 
In order to change some X resources, edit the file:
  ~/.hepix/xresources. 

Question (QA 372)   - Exceed - Cannot open default font

When I try to start Exceed v6(new) I get the following error:

       Fatal Error: Cannot open default font 
and then Exceed exits. What should I do ?

Answer   -   There are several things to test:
  • This might be just a temporary problem, and you may try first to reboot the PC.
  • Check if the network is OK.
  • Another possible explanation from Hummingbird technical support is:
       Apparently, the problem comes from having too many fonts 
        installed on the Workstation. Windows has a limit for fonts,  
        and when you hit the limit, Exceed can't load the default font (6x13). 
       
        ----------------------------------------------------------------- 
       
                Please make sure he is able to view the font 6x13. Go to 
        xconfig->font-> font database->misc and make sure he is able to view 
        the font 6x13. Also search for entire system, if you have more than one 
        6x13.fon file, please only keep the one in exceed\font\misc directory. 
        Please go to control panel->fonts. If you find a lot of fonts here, 
        please delete some of them.  Windows 95 has a limit of 1000 fonts. 
        Certain products like Corel Draw install many fonts. It is recommended 
        that the number of Corel fonts installed is not greater than 500. You 
        will have to delete some of these fonts, preferably leaving less than 
        500 fonts in the Control Panel. Also check if the following is true 
        under Xconfig->fonts->font defaults:  Fixed = Fixed cursor = cursor 
    
    
Otherwise you should ask the Helpdesk (78888) to send you someone from the PC local support of your division, who will have to come and see your PC.

Question (QA 375)   - LSF job and AFS token

Can you please explain why my LSF job failed with the following error:

   No AFS token 
   @(#)CERN job starter 2.07 16/4/2000 

Answer   -   The current mechanism to retrieve and renew AFS token in batch jobs has some weaknesses, in particular the fact that no retry is performed in case there is a failure in connecting to the authentication server. Any overload of the server, temporary network problem or even AFS cache corruption is likely to be a possible explanation.

The most frequent explanation is that too many jobs start at the same time; then some of them may not get AFS tokens as the AFS server may have problems to handle all the requests. This is a *known* "feature" of the LSF/AFS combination. The work-around is NOT to submit too many batch requests at the same time. In your submission script, try to leave a 1 minute period between two bsub commands.

Some intervention to reduce the probability of failures has already been identified, and is in the action list of the AFS support team in IT, but its feasibility depends mainly on usual constraints as priorities and resource allocation.

 


Mail support  -  

(Michel Franceschi and Miguel Marquina  IT/User Support)

Question (QA 353)   - "pine" from a login different than the mail one

How to use "pine" from a login different than the mail one?

Variant 1

I am a PLUS/WGS user of "pine" and I have several mail accounts I'd like to manage from a "single location". The point is that in spite of defining additional INBOX entries for those accounts, I keep getting questioned "ad nauseam" to supply the password for anything (opening a folder, the inbox, etc) related to a login different to mine. "pine" is really unusable in this way! Help!

Variant 2

Unfortunately my PLUS/WGS loginid is different to my mail one because I just changed of experiment. I can accept that I am asked to supply my password when opening my mail with "pine". But only once! However "pine" keeps asking me for giving the login and password again and again, even to access my local folders. Can I hope that this improves?

Answer   -   When opening a mail session with an IMAP-compliant client such as "pine", two distinct dialogues get established: one to deal with the INBOX, another to deal with the existing "folder-collections". The point is that "pine" can be told to open an INBOX and/or folders of an account different to the usual one (upon provision of a valid password of course), but this is relatively tricky.

Technically speaking the pine configuration parameters would look something like:

inbox-path={loginid.mailbox.cern.ch/user=loginid}inbox
 folder-collections="{loginid.mailbox.cern.ch/user=loginid}~/mail/[]"

If you don't want to bother mangling with pine configurations, you might welcome "xpine", a modest CERN wrapping/extension to "pine" to make the above in some transparent manner. Simply execute:

 xpine -login loginid
which will open a second "pine" session (eventually at a separate window) for the wanted loginid. A man page for "xpine" is also available.

Question (QA 391)   - What is UALA?

I have heard of a web interface to view the archives of a mailing list, something called UALA. What is it?

Answer   -   UALA stands for
Unlimited Access to Listbox Archives

There are several parameters controlling the behaviour of the web archives associated to a mailing list. All of them can be edited by the list owner(s) via the SIMBA interface. These are:

 UALA Status (Whether web archives are enabled or not) 
  
 UALA Template (HTML Template to use for web archives) 
  
 UALA Authentication (Type of authentication required to access web archives) 
  
 UALA List Access (to grant access to the archives to people other than 
        list members and authenticated users) 

 


Web Publishing  -  

(Maria Dimou  IT/User Support)

Question (QA 371)   - cgi-bin directory on Personal Web sites

My Web pages are under AFS and were not created using the new automatic registration. I would like the cgi-bin directory to be enabled. What should be done ?

Answer   -   You should delete and recreate the site using the Web registration form, at URL:
 https://web0.cern.ch/WebRegister/RegistrationStep1.asp 

Question (QA 379)   - Netscape problems on X-terminal

When I run Netscape on HPPLUS and using an X-terminal I am flooded by this kind of message:

   netscape: 
   X Error of failed request:  BadPixmap (invalid Pixmap parameter) 
     Major opcode of failed request:  54 (X_FreePixmap) 
     Resource id in failed request:  0x1c004df 
     Serial number of failed request:  5742 
     Current serial number in output stream:  5817 
     Widget hierarchy of resource: unknown 
  
This prevents me from using it in a reasonable way. I am using:
  /usr/local/bin/netscape 
  version 4.7 

Answer   -   Most probably it is a problem with your X-terminal, and it might simply be a lack of memory in order to run an X-window application (quite consuming) like Netscape.

You should check whether you have the same problem using another device (e.g. X-terminal or PC with Exceed), and if this is happening on all PLUS services. If it works fine on another X-terminal with more memory, then you should contact the Helpdesk in order to have your X-terminal upgraded with more memory (if this is possible).

 


Text Processing  -  


Question (QA 377)   - CERN Conversion Service

What is the "CERN Conversion Service"?

Answer   -   The CERN Conversion Service exists to provide a facility for all CERN members to easily convert a document from one given format to another.

All you need to do is choose the format conversions you desire, leave your email address and upload your file, and the system will do the rest.

Using the Web-based interface it is possible to upload single files one at a time, or several files collectively as a Tar or Zip archive. All conversions should complete within an hour or they will be cancelled automatically by the system. Notification is sent notification by email when conversions are completed.

See all details, and access at URLs:

 http://documents.cern.ch/Convert 
  
 http://documents.cern.ch/Convert?upload 
If you have problems you can contact the people responsible at Convert.Support@cds.cern.ch.

Question (QA 384)   - Acrobat 4 (and acroread) on UNIX platforms

What are the plans to put Acrobat 4 in production on UNIX platforms ?

It seems that on NICE acrobat reader is version 4.0 while on Unix (e.g. LXPLUS) it is still version 3.0.

Answer   -   Status in March 2001:

The acrobat reader 4 on Unix with AFS is suffering the same bug as was ghostview (and gv) some years ago: i.e., when it runs in a directory it tries to discover the full tree structure. This, for a user with an AFS home directory, is fatal (as AFS is too big for that): it takes a huge amount of time, but it can even fail when it tries to follow all links (which causes it to crash in case of 'circular' links).

Conversely to ghostview some years ago, Adobe (the owner of acrobat reader) is not free software (and not open source), thus we cannot correct the problem. Unfortunately it seems that Adobe has no plan to correct this.

At CERN, on ASIS, a small wrapper script installed with acrobat 4.05 tries to prevent this situation: if the command acroread is invoked without parameters the script changes its current working directory to $HOME/.acroread and only then launches real binary. But this workaround is not fully satisfactory and it has been decided to keep acrobat reader 3.0 as the production version on Unix.

Anyhow, if you want acroread 4, it is available on ASIS but just as "Certified". It is possible to get it on your own workstation, by login as root and using tkwsm (see http://cern.ch/asis/primer) - select X11/acrobat as Latest version and re-run ASISwsm -

Question (QA 517)   - p-bar (anti-proton) sign in M/S Office documents

I frequently need to use the p-bar (anti-proton) character in Word documents (i.e. a small p with a bar on top of it) but this symbol is not defined on any of the fonts available on PCs.

Answer   -   A possible solution/workaround is the following: inside the application, go into Insert/Object/MS Equation Editor, and type the letter p. Then use the tool symbol to insert the bar on top of the p. Copy/paste it so that it stays in the clipboard for multiple usage.

You can also use this method for other M/S applications, e.g. Excel. Unfortunately, it is not possible to create a macro containing this special character.


About the author(s): Nicole Crémel is working in the User Support group and, with Roger Woolnough, is responsible for the supervision of operations of the Computing Helpdesk. Editing and revising the "Question and Answers" database is a daily task of most members of the group.


For matters related to this article please contact the author.
Cnl.Editor@cern.ch


CERN-CNL-2001-001
Vol. XXXVI, issue no 1


Last Updated on Thu Apr 05 15:28:11 CEST 2001.
Copyright © CERN 2001 -- European Organization for Nuclear Research