Intro to the Lab

• Halligan 223
• Ours except during Es4 labs posted on door.
• Scheduling will be a problem.

Lab Rules

• Open 9 am to approximately midnight.
• For work by groups of four people.
• Get out during Es4 labs. This means you.
• Don't unplug anything except monitors with power on. We've found unplugging monitors to be relatively safe. We lose more disk drives and keyboards by unplugging them that way.
• Please, please don't 'borrow' floppy disks from the stations. We need them in order to boot linux.

A tour of the lab

• 10 workstations with four PC's each, four keyboards, one monitor.
  
  
• Several kinds of computers (a ragtag, fugitive fleet of hardware)
  • A stack consisting of AST's on top and NEC's on bottom.
  • A stack consisting of AST's on top and Gateways on bottom.
  • A stack consisting of AST's on top and DEC Alpha PC's on bottom.

Brief comments on Computers

• Nec's, Gateway's, Alphas:
  • about 1 GB hard drive space.
  • 16 MB memory (one with 12, sigh).
  • main computers for assignments.
  • enough disk for a full redhat install.
• AST's:
  • 280 MB hard drive space.
  • 16 MB main memory.
  • Just enough to run a stripped server with minimal services.

The Room 223 Network

• Twisted pair wires from backs of computers...
  
• Into patch panels on both sides of the room...
• Which connect to hubs on both sides of the room...
• and connect all computers to a central server tcp.eecs.tufts.edu.
• and connect through a wall jack to the EECS network.

Why all this trouble?

• Not enough (working) CDROM drives or CDROM's.
• Means we need to build linux off the network.
• Which means the network has to precede Linux building.

Booting our linux boxes (Assignment 1)

• Find the Linux network boot disk for your machine...
• Place it in the floppy drive and boot.
• Press return at the boot: prompt.
• Select boot from network.
• Enter the following information:
  • Network card you have: 3com 3c509 for Gateways, NEC, Alpha. Intel 16 for AST.
  • Your IP Address: on front of each machine.
  • Your Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
  • Your primary gateway: 0.0.0.0 (none)
  • Address of NFS server: 192.168.1.1 (tcp.eecs.tufts.edu)
  • Location of RedHat Distribution: /home/RedHat (or /home/RedHatAlpha for the alphas)
  • Sizes of disk partitions: 900 MB /, 100 MB swap.
  • Software to install: everything.

But what are we doing?