Support for Windows Users

What we support

• File sharing with the Unix network
• Printing
• Email
• Accessing UNIX from outside CSL
• Useful software for Windows users

What we do not support

• Dual Boot
• Accessing Windows machines from outside CSL

File sharing with the Unix network:

We now support accessing your Unix home directory from within Windows using Windows file sharing. To access your UNIX home directory, connect to \\csl-dcx1 and provide your Windows CSL Domain password.

If you log in to the Windows CSL Domain when you begin your Windows session, csl-dcx1 will not demand a password. If you log in to some other domain or to the local machine, you will be asked for a password when you connect to csl-dcx1. You can browse

 
[My Network Places]
  |
  +-> [Entire Network]
	|
	+-> [Microsoft Windows Network] 
	    |
		+-> [CSL]
		    |
			+-> [CSL-DCX1]

You can also choose [Start] -> Run

Right-click on any folder and create a shortcut to put on your desktop.

You should see:

• your UNIX home directory
• printers [bclw], [dclw], ....
• [Printers] which outlines print queue activity
• [www], which is the group web page
• [homes], which you can ignore

You should NOT see:

• anyone else's home directory
• the Allerton web pages on the Communications servers
• any other directory

Printing:

To add any of these printers to your configuration, see Adding a Printer under Windows.
Due to the method used to access these printers, you cannot use the native printer driver for the two Lexmark printers. Instead when asked to identify the printer, identify it as a generic PostScript printer. This will cause all printer output generated by your computer to be sent as a postscript file to the printer.

Important: do not attempt to use the native (PCL) driver for the Lexmark printers.
Use Postscript instead

The native driver for the Lexmark printers is a PCL based driver. The output generated by this driver will be interpreted by our Unix print server as a text file, and the resulting output of the printer will be many (perhaps hundreds) of pages of useless printer directives.

Mail access:

Secure POP and IMAP will soon be available.

Accessing the Unix network from outside:

Due to security concerns we do not allow access to our Unix hosts via telnet, FTP or other unencrypted protocols. Briefly, these protocols expose passwords and other sensitive data to network intruders.

We support connecting to our network using the SSh Secure Shell (SSh) protocol. More information and easily installed Windows versions can be obtained from UIArchive which will usually have the best version to use on campus. The commercial SSH-win program will provide you with both terminal access and file transfer , and it is free for academic use.

Other useful software for Windows users:

There is a tremendous amount of free software available for Windows users. Many of the programs available on our Unix network have been ported and made available for Windows users thanks to the Cygwin GCC project.
I have included below some links I have found useful in the past:

• MikTeX - A free port of TeTex to the MS Windows platform
• NTEmacs - A free port of emacs to the MS Windows platform.
• Xemacs - A free port of the xemacs program to MS Windows.
• Scilab - A free program along the lines of Matlab is available on most operating systems and does not require you be connected to the license server for operation. There are some subtle differences between scilab and Matlab that you will need to be aware of if you attempt to port matlab code into it.
• Ghostview/Ghostscript - A free port of the GNU ghostscript and ghostview programs to the MS Windows platform. These programs allow you to view postscript documents online.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader - A freely used PDF reader.
• winzip - This shareware program allows you to create and manipulate various archive formats including but not limited to .zip, .tar gzip and lha files. It is a must have on your Windows computer.
• Various other programs have been licensed by the university and are available at the CCSO web site.

• The need to make configuration changes to every OS on a machine
• Dual-boot computers are implicitly up or down at the whim of the user at the console.
• It is much easier to break the security of a computer when it is in the boot process than once it the OS is running
• It is often trivial to defeat the security of an operating system from an alternate operating system on the same computer.