Introduction to Computing and ICT Facilities

Startup for New Students

• Facilities: The main chemistry computer facilities are located in two rooms, which are open 0830-22.30 Monday-Friday. One is normally scheduled for taught courses, the other is part of the student study area. 24-Hour opening is available in the central library area.
• User accounts: All new BSc, MSci and Socrates Exchange students who have registered at Imperial College will have been allocated an e-mail account for use in the chemistry department. This account can be activated from any Web-access point via the URL: https://www.ic.ac.uk/ict/activateaccount/. You will need to provide your personal details such as date of birth and the College ID (CID) number that you will have received through the post. You will then be asked to set an account password. This will have to conform to certain rules which will be explained here. Important: If you are activating your account on a College computer, you will need to log into it first using the temporary account activate. The password for this is displayed in most computer rooms.
• Logging in:
  • Login:The Windows XP, MacOS X and Unix (Redhat Linux Enterprise 4) computers ALL require that the login and password be typed. Remember, the password is CASE sensitive. Concentrate also on whether what you need to type is e.g. a zero (0) or an o/O, an i/I or a one (1), an S or a five (5), etc. If you are asked for a domain, ensure you specify IC.
  • Password change:You can change your password. On Windows, press Command-alt-delete (i.e. all three keys at once) to bring up the Task Manager, and select Password from there. Note that the password may not be updated until 20 minutes past the hour, so you might not get an instant response. If you forget your password, you will have to get someone from the faculty IT support team (see below) to reset your password. It is also possible to change a password using this web page.
• Course Notes: The definitive pointers to all on-line course notes and materials are to be found at:
  1. http://www.ic.ac.uk/chemistry/students/teaching/
  2. The above should normally point you to https://webct.imperial.ac.uk/ where much relevant teaching documentation should be found.
  3. A number of course notes are also held at http://teaching.ch.ic.ac.uk/, including lecture http://teaching.ch.ic.ac.uk/podcasts/index.rss and the (Chemical) IT course
• Help:
  • Support is available from the Service Desk in the ICT division, located on level 4 of the Sherfield building (one floor down from the Pippard lecture theatre) or by emailing service.desk@imperial.ac.uk. The Faculty ICT support team have an office in the chemistry department, located off room 134, where urgent and chemistry specific queries can be directed.
  • The Operating systems directly supported are Windows XP Professional (not in 2007 Vista), Linux Redhat (Enterprise version 4) and MacOS X (Version 10.4/5).
• Storage areas:
  • Files-to-stay: Once you have logged in, this process will have set up a number of storage areas.
    1. You have a hard drive C:. This contains system files, applications, temporary areas and other files. You should not normally try to save anything on C:, since the files will stay with the machine, and not move if you log onto a different machine.
    2. There are four network drives, which do move with the machine, i.e. anything you put in these is available on any machine. The first is drive H: on a device called the SAN, in the example here as icfs8.cc.ic.ac.uk, and is where your documents are normally stored. Clicking on a "home" icon on a (Windows or MacOS X) desktop should take you straight to this area. It has a space quota of 200/400 Mbytes. The drive H: area will also be available to MacOS X users (again use the designation "Home" to reach H:).
    3. Drive L: is an area used as "home" when you log into the Linux operating system. It is where documents created using Linux are stored. The quota here is 500 Mbytes.
    4. Drive N: is what we call a data silo. It has larger capacity than H: or L:, but the files are not backed up, and may be deleted if the space is needed by others. Use this for storing temporary, but perhaps larger files.
    5. Drive R: contains spectroscopy files from NMR samples, to which you need access in some courses. You cannot write to this area.

    Please note that if you exceed your allocation of 200/400 Mbytes in drive H: or drive L:, new files cannot be written, and you will need to delete some old ones. Find out how much space you have on any drive by selecting it, pressing the right-mouse-button, and opting for TreeSize from the menu that appears. This will tell you the distribution of files within the entire drive, and enables you to decide what to focus on if files need deleting to create space (to delete, right mouse click in treeview). In the example on the left, the two directories flagged red are clearly the problem (one of them, My Music, was the result of trying to store the iTunes library on H:. See below).

  • Files-to-go: To move documents from College computers to your own personal systems, you are advised to purchase a "USB Pen drive" or "Memory stick" device. These plug into the USB port, located on the keyboard or front panel of the computer. Typically, a 4 Gbyte device will cost about £25 and 1 Gbyte £10. Larger sizes (up to 16 Gbyte, as part of e.g. an iPod Nano Touch) are available. Floppy disk is extinct (but they can still be read). Email (often limited to around 20 Mbytes as an attachment), CD-RW (650MB via writable CDs), 4.6 Gbyte via writable DVDs and up to 160 Gbyte using an iPod Classic can all also be used.
    
  • Files-to-roam: Roaming files means those which are available to you from any location in the world. A number of services of this type are available. You might wish to try out Microsoft's skydrive, but only if you are happy with their privacy statement. This allows up to 400 Mbyte of such storage.
  • Files-to-listen/view. A small number of lecture courses have an associated Podcast. These are of the enhanced audio type, and include lecture slides and link to appropriate web sites. One procedure to acquire a podcast proceeds through iTunes. Using this program requires a little care. Audio (and video) files can be very large, and by default, they are stored by iTunes in your own networked document area (i.e. drive H:) where just 3-4 such files could cause you to exceed your space allocation of 300 Mbytes. To ensure this does not happen, start up iTunes (you will be asked to accept a license agreement) and from Edit/Preferences/Advanced, set the iTunes Music folder location to e.g. an iPod or USB stick that you have previously plugged into a USB port (this works best if you use a USB 2.0 device, rather than the older, much slower, but now rare USB 1.1 type). If you do not have a USB storage device handy, set the iTunes Music folder location to N: instead. Some mobile phones (i.e.the Nokia N91) can also download a podcast directly as can an iPod Nano Touch using WiFi.

    If you have been given the URL of podcast material, click on the following e.g. itpc://teaching.ch.ic.ac.uk/podcasts/index.rss (this will open iTunes, subscribe the podcast, and download the latest entry automatically for you). or if that does not work, enter the above using Advanced/Subscribe to Podcast, or enter http://teaching.ch.ic.ac.uk/podcasts/index.rss into an RSS-aware Web browser. Once the podcast is subscribed, click on the little triangle (red circle) to view all the individual entries.
    

• EMail: Your account can be used to receive and send electronic mail. If you wish to change details about yourself in the College email directory, go here. When letting others know how to send mail to you, tell them to use the E-mail name:
  firstname.lastname07@ic.ac.uk.
  Don't confuse your email name with your login name. When sending mail, you can use Microsoft Outlook (Windows) or Apple Mail (MacOS X). Do NOT use Outlook Express (which bears no relation to Outlook itself!). Documentation on how to use this is to be found here. You can also use the web page: https://icex.imperial.ac.uk/Exchange/ if you are away from College.

  You are reminded that inappropriate use of email ( as detailed in the guidelines) could result in disciplinary action against you by the College.

  Multiple Mail accounts: Many students will already have their own email account. You can continue to use this, and read email sent to it whilst you are at College, but you will not be able to send email using this account from a College Computer. Most mail programs can be configured to accept "multiple personalities" which allow you to read several accounts in sequence.

• Profiles: Your user preferences/customisations (along with e.g. items placed on the "desktop" etc) are stored in something called your Profile. This can either be stored on the hard drive of the machine you are using (local or non-roaming profile) or on the SAN (roaming profile). New user accounts (2007) currently are set to roaming profile on and additional are issued with a digital certificate with which you can sign email and documents.
• Software: This includes Web browsing programs, Microsoft Office 2007 (which includes Outlook 2007) and presentation programs such as Powerpoint, EndNote (for keeping track of references) and various chemical drawing, modelling and visualisation systems, spectroscopic processing and data acquisition programs.
• Printing: Printing is a centralised service, with collection points located throughout the College. There are two in chemistry, in each of the two computer rooms. Access is by swipe card, credit for which can be arranged.
• Mobile phones: It can be very useful to connect a Mobile via a USB cable or e.g. Bluetooth to a computer in order to backup your list of phone addresses. Unfortunately, due to the plethora of different phones, and the software which needs to be used for this purpose, its not possible to implement a generic solution to this problem; specific solutions for e.g Nokia do exist but no support for any of these is currently offered. If you are using an Apple iPhone, iTunes must be used to manage it.
• Logging out: When you have finished a session on any computer, you must
  • NOT SWITCH or POWER OFF the computer
  • Instead, log off the computer, but do not RESTART or POWER it down

Good Practice in Computer Use

• Game playing is strongly discouraged. We also discourage the use of real time "chat" sessions, streaming video, and "illegal downloads".
• When using personal computers, you are advised to copy your critical personal documents and files to your 300 Mbyte allocation of network disk space (drive H: or also drive L/N:) which are both backed up on a nightly basis. Also, keep at least two backup copies of such critical files, one on a removable medium such as USB Pen-Drive, and one on a hard disk somewhere. You should be able to find out whether your H: drive is full from the Network drives display (shown above). IMPORTANT: Programs like Microsoft Word can generate quite large documents, and lots of temporary files, backup versions etc. If you save/access your document directly from drive H:, you may find that it is slow (because a network drive can be slower than a hard disk drive) and also because your 300 Mbyte quota will be exceeded (even if temporarily). You are strongly advised whilst you are creating/editing such potentially large documents to store them directly to the hard disk (C:) in the temp area, and then copy this version of the file to H: just before you log out of your session, or even better also to a removable device such as a USB Drive.
• Students in general do not have permission to mount their personal web pages on departmental servers. However, we are happy to mount specific chemistry related projects on our pages.

Using your Own Computer

• Campus Computer Purchase: This year, students are eligible for HP computers and HP iPAQ handhelds at the Imperial corporate price points. Contact the ICT Software shop for more details (level 4, Mech. Eng building). Other Mail order (e.g): http://www.dabs.com/uk for commodities such as memory, hard drives, etc. Apple: http://apple.procureweb.ac.uk/ for favourable deals on Apple computers, iPods, etc.

• Software: As undergraduate students, you are not in general currently allowed to install College-licensed software onto your private computer (such as the Microsoft operating systems, the Microsoft office suite, and chemistry specific software). You ARE allowed to install the Norton anti-virus software. You can however often get very good price deals as students for much other software. One such good deal is Office 2007 Ultimate, which costs 38.95 for a perpetual license, or 12.95 for a one year license.

• Computer Health check: A free CD has been made available from Student halls of residence, and is also available from the ICT help desk area (level 4, Mech. Eng, room 481), which contains useful tools for eliminating virus infections, malware etc. You can also take your e.g. laptop to the help desk area for a drop-off and pick-up service, whereby you leave the computer to be given a health check. In chemistry, a Faculty-based ICT support team is located in the Chemistry department, in room 134.

• Hall of Residence: A Scheme called Student Connect allows students in halls of residence to access departmental facilities. Support for this is run entirely by Student Connect, whom you should approach in case of difficulties (their office is in Sherfield Building, close to the Natwest bank).
• Connection in College: Only "Health Checked" computers should be connected to the Imperial network. Wi-Fi zones are available in the main computer room and laboratories to facilitate this (see below). In order for the connection to work correctly, you must register your computer for our network. Do the following:
  
  
  1. Connect to http://netreg.ic.ac.uk/ using some other machine
  2. Enter into this database the so-called MAC (Media Access Control) ethernet address of your laptop using the instructions given at the above site.
  3. The laptop should be configured to get its network settings using "DHCP".

  If you do get a virus (and it can sometimes take only a few seconds for your system to become infected if its online) this will be quickly detected and your machine disabled from using the network. It will then be a moderately bureaucratic process to get your machine allowed back onto the network (and no-one likes bureaucracy!).

• WiFi Hotspots: The chemistry study area, Pippard and Lecture theatres C and D, Perkin, Briscoe and Frankland laboratories all have a Wireless Network system (along with other Wi-Fi "hot spots" around College, which are being constantly added to; look out for notices bearing the logo shown on the right). If you install a wireless card into your laptop, you can connect to the network, which will appear as Imperial-WPA. You will also need to configure your system to connect as described here.
  
• VPN Connection: Much valuable information is available by licensing schemes which are valid only within the College "LAN", which is defined by a range of IP addresses. It is possible however to access this LAN from outside College (e.g. from an Internet Service provider using a modem or ADSL connection) as described here.
• Access to your "Home directory" from outside College:. Once you have established a connection as per above, you can then access your College files. Detailed instructions on how to do this are available here.
• Consumables: Blank CDs/DVDs, printer paper, ethernet patch leads etc are available from the ICU shop on the walkway.

Copyright (c) H. S. Rzepa, 1994-2007.