CERN Accelerating science

Answer   -   If you use Internet Explorer (IE, currently v.5) there is a smart feature which does exactly what you want.

Internet Explorer has a full-screen mode that you access by pressing F11. However, the screen still shows boxes to minimise, resize, or close the window, so this is not exactly what you want either.

The KIOSK mode, on the other hand, hides all buttons. To start IE in Kiosk mode, from the Run prompt (Start - Run) start IE with the following command:

iexplore -k [site]

where [site] is:

 
    - blank: this uses your default start page 

    - a URL (e.g., http://consult/xfind): 
           uses the page the URL specifies 

    - a local Web page (e.g. C:\folder\page.htm): 
           uses the specified local page 

    - a remote Web page (e.g. \\server\share\folder\page.htm): 
           uses the remote page 

Within Kiosk mode, you can use these main commands (print them out beforehand, as afterwards you will be without any toolbar help!):

 Ctrl+A: Select all (editing) 
 Ctrl+B: Organise favorites 
 Ctrl+C: Copy (editing) 
 Ctrl+F: Find (on current page) 
 Ctrl+H: View History folder 
 Ctrl+L: Open Location dialog box (same as Ctrl+O) 
 Ctrl+N: New window (this one opens in non-Kiosk mode) 
 Ctrl+O: Open Location dialog box (same as Ctrl+L) 
 Ctrl+P: Print 
 Ctrl+R: Refresh 
 Ctrl+S: Save 
 Ctrl+V: Paste (editing) 
 Ctrl+W: Close (same as Alt+F4) 
 Ctrl+X: Cut (editing) 
 Alt+F4: Close (same as Ctrl+W) 
 Alt+Left Arrow: Back 
 Alt+Right Arrow: Forward 
 Esc: Stop 
 F5: Refresh 

The rest is a piece of cake: 'printscreen' or 'ALT+printscreen',
exit the Kiosk mode (see above) and paste the beauty into Word - bingo!

Answer   -   You can configure a given printer from your PC to only select your jobs between certain hours:

 - My Computer
 - Printers
 - Right-click on the printer you want and select "properties"
 - Click the "Scheduling" tab, and at the top in the "Available" section
    choose "From" and enter a 'From' and a 'To' time, e.g. 18:00 - 08:30
 - Click OK to save your changes
 

Jobs submitted by you to this printer from this PC will now only be printed between the hours specified, but be aware that this of course affects all your documents. However, your documents that are spooled from another PC (but the same account) will be printed normally.

Don't forget to change the settings back to "always" in the "available" field after your document has printed.

Answer   -   To get the MAC address of your W2k PC(MAC stands for Media Access Control):

• right-click 'My Computer'
• click 'Manage' and then:

    
   (+) System Tools 
     (+) System Information 
       (+) Components 
         (+) Network > Adapter > MAC Address 
     
   [the (+) sign means expand the tree] 
   
  

Answer   -   Although in many cases not dangerous, the message is at least bothering and just tells the user there *might* be conflicts.

To get rid of it, please really follow the procedure like described, including a scaring statement saying 'just power off your PC'. The reason for this is that with a normal, proper rundown the file NTUSER.DAT gets endlessly re-written back to the server, which in that case is obviously not desirable.

And bear in mind: Never use the same NICE account on NT and W2000 in parallel, but get 2 different accounts, one for each OS. This is recommended in the documentation part of:
http://winservices.cern.ch, and the related QA: http://consult.cern.ch/qa/0576

Answer   -   It was officially decided at CERN that the NICE trustee manager only lets users modify rights for folders, but not files.

The only workaround is therefore to create a new folder, put the file into it and then give rights to this folder.

Answer   -   Being registered as the owner of a group doesn't necessarily mean you have full rights.

The structure of the NICE group manager is:

 
 Group manager 
   --contains--> Classes 
              --contain--> Groups 
                      --contain--> Members 
 

So, in order to have full rights of IT-XX you should have been registered on the next higher level, in this case in the class IT, which you aren't. More, you don't even want to be, as this would empower you to have rights over other groups in there which you don't need.

A general solution is therefore (same example taken again):

 
 - Create a class IT-XX Admins. 
 - and create an associated group IT-XX Users 
 

Answer   -   Applications you only find on dfs are not supported by the NICE 2000 team, they are just there "as-is". Applications you need support for must only be installed from 'add/remove programs - add new programs' (via the control panel).

Answer   -   W2000 allows you to run a full or partial audit of practically all hardware and software 'bells and whistles' your PC is capable of.

The command msinfo32 /? gives you a brief overview over the command syntax. Thus, for instance, you could run a total audit of your PC configuration using the command

msinfo32 /report C:\report.txt

which would output this report onto the file report.txt of your C\ drive.

Note that during this procedure (which takes a few minutes) the above file can not be viewed. Also, as all hard- and software features are queried on a full report, your local disk(s) might make some strange vibrating noise for a few seconds.

Answer   -   Although Office 2000 applications are very stable, you may (apart from the 'usual' recipes) also try to repair a particular W2000 Office installation.

End-users can remove, change Office components only if they have sufficient privileges to perform these tasks. In practice, only the member of the local Administrators group can do this. However, any user can repair any office 2000 installation.

To repair Office, just select "Detect and Repair" from the "help" menu within any office application.

Answer   -   Yes. There are, in fact, different possibilities to use the Euro symbol inside both Office 97 and Office 2000 applications:

Word and Powerpoint have the Euro symbol in their insert - symbol collection. Excel, however, is a bit more complicated, as it doesn't have this function. To type it inside Excel, use the key combination "ALTGR+0128" (where ALTGR is the right/hand ALT key) on a US keyboard. This key sequence is also available on all other Office applications.

Users who have a French keyboard must use the combination "ALTGR+E" instead.

To apply the Euro currency format to values in your Excel worksheet, first select the values you want to format. On the Format menu, click Cells, and then click the Number tab. In the Category list, click Currency, and then click the Euro currency format you want to use in the Symbol list.

 Note that there is, of course, also the possibility to copy/paste 
 the Euro symbol from "More Applications - Accessories - CharMap" 
 on NICE 95/NT or "Programs - Accessories - Character Map" on NICE 2000.

 
 ls: /afs/cern.ch/atlas/project/graphics/DB/Linux: No such file or 
 directory 
 

Answer   -   This generally means an AFS corrupted entry for this directory, while it is still visible on other nodes. Normally this error will timeout within the next 24 hours, otherwise the machine node (with the problem) will have to be rebooted by the service managers.

Meanwhile users should logout and login on another node.

Answer   -   The ATLAS interactive nodes are being reinstalled with a more standard configuration and hostname, in preparation for a merge into the LXPLUS cluster. The major difference users will see is the removal of NFS accessible file-systems, which was used for the scratch area. This was agreed between the IT and ATLAS computing coordinators, for issues of system management and maintenance.

The functional alternative suggested is AFS scratch areas assigned under the user home directories as scratch0, scratch1, etc... These directories are personal to the account so must be managed by the owner and, being scratch, are not backed up. Users can copy existing files to these new directories by logging in to the old ATLAS nodes.

Currently we invite all users to forward directly such requests to AFS support (Afs.Support@cern.ch) to get the AFS area setup, specifying how much space (in Megabytes) they think they need.

Please give feedback on the usability of this new solution via the ATLAS mailing list, at atlas-support@listbox.cern.ch

 
  No AFS token 
  @(#)CERN job starter 2.08 6/6/2000 
 

Answer   -   The latest version of the job_starter should try to avoid this behaviour (sleeping for a few minutes and try again later), but it does not prevent it at 100%. A general advice is, when job production managers start big production, to insert 'sleep 60' between 2 bsub commands in the script that submit the series of jobs.

Answer   -   Following is the "official" statement, as of March 2001, made by the group leader of the IT/API group (Applications for Physic & Infrastructure).

 
 As you may know, CERN is decreasing the FORTRAN support significantly and 
 e.g. the CERNLIB will have its last release in 2002 and be supported in a 
 limited way for two years after that. Several years ago it was decided that 
 we would not move to FORTRAN 90 neither for CERNLIB nor for compiler support 
 in general. The experiments have agreed to this strategy and are actively 
 moving towards C++. 
 For limited and specialized use we do provide the PGF90 compiler as you 
 mentioned. The access and use is described at: 
 http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/pdp/is/eric/pgf.txt 
   
 We have no resources to extend this service in any way - in particular not 
 by providing additional compilers from other suppliers. 
   
 This policy towards C++ has been agreed by the FOCUS committee: 
 http://cern.web.cern.ch/CERN/meetings/FOCUS/Welcome.html 
 which is also the place to formulate requests that are against this official  
 statement(Mailing list: cern-focus@listbox.cern.ch) 
   
 I regret not to be able to give you a more positive answer and remain 
   
 with best regards -- Jurgen Knobloch 
 

 
   f90 -o zzz xxx.f90 `cernlib graflib` 
     Undefined                       first referenced 
      symbol                             in file 
     __e_wsle        /cern/pro/lib/libgrafX11.a(iopks.o) 
     __s_stop        /cern/pro/lib/libpacklib.a(zend.o) 
     __do_f_out_nv   /cern/pro/lib/libpacklib.a(mzdiv.o) 
     __s_wsle_nv     /cern/pro/lib/libgrafX11.a(iopks.o) 
 etc... 
     ld: fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output written to zzz 
 

Answer   -   Following is the answer provided by the CERN Program Librarian. However please note that Fortran 90 is not supported at CERN, as explained at: http://consult.cern.ch/qa/522

    
  This is a bit tricky. The missing externals are from the f77 runtime 
  library which is not included by default by the f90 and f95 Solaris WS6 
  compiler invocations. However, there is an option to simplify inclusion of 
  the f77 compatibility library -xlang=f77, which I found to work for simple 
  applications. So try 
   f90 -xlang=f77 -o zzz xxx.f90 `cernlib graflib` 
 

When the option -xlang=f77 is not recognised by the compiler, the solution can be to find and add the specific f77 runtime library for the system. E.g., on Solaris, /opt/SUNWspro/lib/libf77compat.so, and you can try:

 
    f90 -o zzz xxx.f90 `cernlib graflib` \ 
 /opt/SUNWspro/lib/libf77compat.so 
 

Answer   -   Unfortunately those commands are not available on LINUX, as you can see in the ASIS page:

 
 http://asis.web.cern.ch/asis/products/X11/xgrabsc.html 
 

The ASIS team is inviting users to use instead either "import" (a command from X11/ImageMagick-4.1.6, see http://asis.web.cern.ch/asis/products/X11/ImageMagick.html). or xv, xwd/xpr that work also fine on Linux.

Answer   -   Visual Studio is supported on NICE only in the sense that they will ensure that proper installation can be made. There is no programming or debugging support provided by the NICE team.

IT policy is to support development of scientific software only on Unix, and more precisely only Linux and Solaris, so there is NO SUPPORT for software development (Visual Fortran, C++, etc.) on Windows/NICE. Only the LHCb experiment decided to build their development on Windows, but they are supporting themselves.

In practice this means that questions in this area submitted to IT services (including the Helpdesk) will be replied with this standard answer. When choosing developing on a Windows platform users must understand that are mainly on their own for software development issues.

Please note: it should also be understood that only the programming environment and infrastructure (compilers, loaders, libraries, etc.) for software development will be supported on Unix (Linux and Solaris), but we cannot afford to give general computing usage support for any of the languages. For this, users should refer to specialized books.

Answer   -   From the Netscape session select:

 
 Edit - Preferences... 
 

Category: "Mail & Newsgroup", "Mail Servers",
select your mail server and click on button "Edit" to untick "Remember Password".

Answer   -   Within Netscape (currently v.4.75), it is possible to have multiple address-books (and also bookmark files). However, this is not the CERN standard configuration, and only the default one is mirrored to the user's NICE home server, whereas all others are just stored locally.

Therefore, only this default version ('userid'\w95\nscape4\pab.na2' for the address-book and 'userid'\w95\nscape4\bookmark.htm' for the bookmark file) can be restored from a backup copy in case of file loss or corruption.

For this reason, users are strongly encouraged to stick to the CERN standard Netscape setup.

Answer   -   Outlook Express is an e-mail client and newsreader which comes for free with Internet Explorer. That's just about it.

Outlook (current version 2000) is part of the M/S Office package and is therefore not free.
Not only has it the facilities of Outlook Express, but it is also a good tool for some message networking, and contains modules for group work and a scheduler.

So, Outlook Express is a basic tool for a single PC, whereas Outlook 2000 is more sophisticated and desirable for LANs, networking functions, the like.

Answer   -  

At CERN, there is a command in the ASIS repository which does most of the enabling work, namely eslatex. It is just an appropiate call to tex.

Supposing you have Spanish hyphenation patterns compiled into your LaTeX format, you can also explicitely insert Spanish-related instructions in your document. For instance:

%Specify Spanish as main language
\usepackage[activeacute,spanish]{babel}
% Allows accentued characters as input
%(This is the default on Unix)
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

More about Spanish typesetting with Latex can be found at the Website: http://apolo.us.es/CervanTeX/

Answer   -   TCP/IP addresses starting with 192.91... are being used at CERN, but in all cases point to a privately set up and owned network (private Cisco's and the like). The owner of this computer (see: http://cern.ch/register) has the responsibility and should be contacted.

Answer   -   Look at the CDR FAQs database, as provided by the CDR.Support team, at URL:

 http://cern.ch/cdr/faq

Answer   -   For security reasons system responsible had to close the ftp daemons on SUN machines. Users should use ftp to LXPLUS instead. If the data is local to CMS, use 'scp' to copy it to LXPLUS.
If you have an account on the CMS cluster the only ftp server you can now reach from externally is cmsftp01.cern.ch