• TO DO List
• Known Bugs and Work-Arounds
• Frequently [Asked|Answered|Anticipated] Questions

Friday, April 28, 2000:

Thanks to everyone who stopped by during our Open House, Thursday afternoon, April 27, 2000! We've had several more people putting the machines to good use since the message below was sent out, and if Thursday's response is any indication, we can look forward to even more work being done in the BCBLab.

With the semester winding down, we can begin looking forward to re-configuring the lab. The chief benefit of this reconfiguration will be the ability to take advantage of the dedicated server hardware, RAID storage device, and high-capacity tape backup.

Please take note of the new links above to the Known Bugs and Work-Arounds and TO DO List. A FAQs List is also in the works. If you have things to add to any of the lists, please either direct them to me, or if you're a subscriber to the list (see below on how to subscribe) to bcblab@iastate.edu.

Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 12:49:25 -0600 (CST)
From: "D. Joe Anderson" <deejoe@iastate.edu>
Reply-To: bcblab@iastate.edu
To: icbl@iastate.edu, bcblab@iastate.edu
Subject: BCBLab: Users Needed!

The CAC- and IGERT-funded BCBLab, open from 9am-5pm, and consisting of at least nine Pentium III 500MHz machines running Mandrake Linux 6.1 located in the the basement of the Molecular Biology Building, room MBB0101, can now be considered in a "beta test" phase.

Volker Brendel's class has been using the lab for several weeks with some measure of success, but the lab is still not being used for very many things, so I'd like to encourage other folks to start working in it.

For you too do so, I'll need a few things from you in order to set up your account. To make things more manageable, I'll add those users from whom I get an email request from a valid @iastate.edu address by noon every Wednesday.

This will enable login while sitting at the machines themselves in MBB0101 using one's Acropolis (ie, Project Vincent) username and password, and will allow full access via the X-windows interface (using KDE or Gnome) to all the software installed on the client (web browsers, compilers, text editors, word processors, graphics tools, sequence tools, structural biology tools, etc). It will also allow one access to a network mounted home directory.

We are still in the process of refining the set of installed software, administration procedures, and policy, so your input is needed.

To help me manage accounts, when making your request, please indicate whether you:

• are faculty or staff, grad student, undergraduate, post doc.
• are affiliated with a bcb class, please indicate the professor and/or course number
• are affiliated with a research lab, please indicate the PI's name
• will need to be able to access the machines remotely, please indicate the nature of your intended use (since we don't intend the lab to be a general-purpose remotely-accessible processor farm) and schedule a meeting with me to set up your remote access password for now, lets try to make such meetings on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, but I can be flexible on that point
• are interested in discussing details of the usage of the lab, please subscribe to the bcblab@iastate.edu majordomo mailing list (if you haven't already) by sending the word "subscribe" in the body of an email message to bcblab-request@iastate.edu

Because I anticpate there being large overlap in the subscribers to the icbl and bcblab lists, I'll try to limit messages (such as this one) that are being sent to both.

In short, to use the bcblab, email a request from a valid @iastate.edu address by noon Wednesday indicating as applicable faculty or staff, grad student, undergraduate, post doc. professor and/or course number.

For remote access, indicate the nature of your intended use and schedule a meeting with me to set up your remote access password.

For more discussion subscribe to the bcblab@iastate.edu.