CERN Accelerating science

Facilities in the UCO User Area

  Miguel Marquina and Roger Woolnough IT/User Support

One of the remaining public ``terminal'' areas at CERN is the so called ``User Area'' in buiding 513. It does not resemble at all to one of those former terminal rooms or RIOS centers which were popular years ago (when it was not common to have one machine at each desk).

The added value of this ``User Area'' is not to offer additional connectivity to visitors (who typically are adequately hosted by his CERN contacts including access to our Computing facilities) but to make accesible to CERN users facilities which are rarely found on site otherwise.

We are in the process of refurbishing this area and adding new functionality, which will hopefully be in place at the beginning of 1998:

• 3 color scanners (one connected to Mac and two to PCs)
• dedicated printers attached to the PCs and Macs

We take this opportunity to point out that this equipment is left at the users' disposal on a trust basis. The Macintosh Support team has to intervene every now and then to reload the software after the machine is left in a bad state. A considerable budget and considerable manpower is invested in this area for public use, so we kindly ask you to respect it and leave the machines in the state in which you would wish to find them.

Here is a list of the facilities available (as of January 1998):

• 7 X terminals,
• 3 PCs with dedicated printers,
• 2 Macintoshes with a dedicated printer,
• 3 color scanners (2 PC + 1 Mac),
• 1 A3-capable recto-verso printer,
• 1 high-output Mac printer (513-pub),
• 1 recto-verso HP printer (513-cc),
• 1 recto-verso QMS printer (513-qms),
• 4 colour printers for paper/transparencies,

In addition the UCO Reference Cards are freely available at the self-service documentation area.

In the coming month we will be offering users a self-service documentation PC and printer for smaller documents. We will also have dedicated printers for paper and transparencies on the PC and Mac machines. Please note that high quality transparencies from HP Deskjet 1600CM colour machines and Tektronix Colour printers are available in some divisions -- see the printer support list for details at URL:

New HP colour and transparency machines will be installed in January, as the Tektronix printers 513-cpx will soon be removed from the user area, as will the 513-lps Vax type recto-verso printer, to keep the total installation as up-to-date as possible.