Frequestly Asked Questions

  1. How do I get an email account with the Math department?
  2. How will I know when the account is activated?
  3. How do I setup my home computer so I can logon to the Math department servers?
  4. How do forward my other email accounts to the Math email account?
  5. What's the difference between my Math account and my NetID?
  6. What's the difference between a POP and IMAP email server?
  7. How does restricting the Math Department to IMAP only affect me?
  8. How do I add a command to my path in Unix?

1 First of all, an account has many purposes beyond electronic mail. If you already have an email address and only want to be able to receive email at <somebody>@math.unm.edu we can set it up so that you can have the address <somebody>@math.unm.edu and receive your math email mixed in with the email at your other address without creating a computer account.

If, however, you do not have another email address or you do not want your email mixed in with the email at your other address or you want an account for reasons beyond just email, then you can get a COMPUTER ACCOUNT in the Math Department if - you are faculty or staff employed by the Math Department - you are a graduate student working toward an advanced degree in the Math Department - you are an undergraduate or graduate student of another department and there is a faculty member willing to "sponsor" you.

This is normally done for certain math classes that require computing resources beyond what is available through CIRT. So, given that you really NEED a COMPUTER ACCOUNT in the Math Department, and you are ELIGIBLE for a COMPUTER ACCOUNT in the Math Department, the procedure is as follows: Visit Dann Brewer in room 358 respectively of the Humanities Building. You will be asked on what basis you are eligible for an account and be given a form to fill out.

On this form, you will choose which catagory or catagories of machines you need access to (Windows/UNIX), a username and a password. The latter two of these will be the basis of authentication for the account, ie, you must remember these. When you complete the form, return it to either Dann Brewer. The account will normally be created within 24 hours.
2 Your account will normally be created within 24 hours of the receipt of the form described above. If you cannot log in after this 24-hour period, please contact Dann Brewer or Craig Lewis. You can attempt the login from one of the machines in the lab (Humanities 479) or any other machine in the department you can gain access to. Be aware, however, that we have two catagories of computers in the department ... UNIX workstations and Microsoft Windows PC's. You will only be given accounts on the catagory/catagories you request. If you only request a UNIX account, you must test your login on a UNIX machine.

  3 Bear in mind that this question addresses the question of logging in to a Math Department server. If all you want to do is read email, it is not necessary to log in ... you could do only step 1 below and use a browser such as Mozilla use the department web inteface to read your email. https://mail.math.unm.edu

Given that you really do want to logon to a Math Department server, this is a two-step process:

  • You must establish an internet connection for your home machine. There are two means by which you can do this.
    • You can establish service with an ISP (Internet Service Provider). There are many options for doing this ... several commercial sources such as AOL, Earthlink, etc, and there is one that UNM has an agreement with with whom you can establish service at a discount. (See http://www.technet.nm.net/unm) Your ISP will give you instructions on how to configure your machine to establish an internet connection through them.
    • The department has 8 dialup lines. The numbers are 277-9940 through 277-9948. These lines are poor quality and tend to give unreliable service. We encourage you to establish ISP service, but provide these dialups on an "as-is" basis. Instructions for setting up your computer are given at http://www.math.unm.edu/computer/dialup/desperate/howto.
  • Once you have established an internet connection, you must then establish a connection between your machine and one of the department machines. This can only be done with a client software program that is capable of ssh version 2 protocol. One way to do this is to download the client program from one of the mirrors on the ssh website (see http://www.ssh.com/products/ssh/download.cfm), and example of which is ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/packages/security/ssh Once you have your internet connection made and your ssh client installed, it is just a matter of logging in using your user name and password (see above) and picking a department machine. Be sure to use the complete internet machine name when loggin in. Examples are of department machines are: joyspride.math.unm.edu llull.math.unm.edu (llull is spelled with four lower case "L"s) ezra.math.unm.edu .
  4  In a UNIX environment, you log into a UNIX machine and create a file named ".forward" in your home directory containing a single line whose contents are the email adress to which you want your email forwarded. If you forward your email to one location and at that location forward it back again, you will get predictable results.
5 Your math account gives you access to computers and servers within the despartment. A netID serves a similar purpose for the UNM servers. Certain web services such as web email, roster of classes and web grades require your netID. While the user Id and password might be the same for both accounts they are not connected in any way. Authentication for each is entirely separate.

6 The Math Department only supports an IMAP email server. Both POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) are protocols of communication between two machines for viewing and maintaining your electronic mail, and for sending electronic mail. The difference is that POP downloads an entire copy of the mail to your local machine and updates it there.

Your choices are to delete all the mail from the server or to leave a copy of all the mail there, resulting either in your mail being inaccessible from machines other than the one you downloaded the mail to, or having duplicate messages, ie, messages that you think you deleted will show up again on a different machine. IMAP, on the other hand, passes commands to the server to update your mail and maintains a one-to-one correspondence between what you see on your local machine and the state of your mailbox.

7 Besides POP, a third method of maintaining your electronic mail is by directly editting your mailbox on the local machine. This is accomplished by allowing the local machine to mount the mail spool via Network File System (NFS). It is very problematic because it is possible for your to edit your mailbox from multiple locations at the same time the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA - the program that delivers your mail to your mailbox) is trying to edit your mailbox. This causes problems when all the programs that are editting your mailbox are not using the same (or compatable) locking mechanisms, a problem that has been occasionally seen here in the Math Department. So, in the near future, we will quit exporting the mail spool to remote machines which will disable direct editting of the mailbox. Mailers such as UNIX "mail" and "mailx" which rely on this method will no longer be able to read your mail. They can be used, however, to send messages out. Most other mailers, Pine, Netscape, Mozilla, Eudora, etc, can be configured to use IMAP rather than the other methods. Instructions are provided at http:/www.math.unm.edu/whereever If you are used to using POP, you will see the differences described above.

1. Until we get ldap; I think it would be best to just say that an email, unix account and windows account should be created for anyone that wants any one of these services. At present we don't have adequate means by which to deal with the scenario in which joeuser wants an email address in the math department. Then one year later, joe blinking user wants a joeusr account on the unix system. same kind of thing happens when a user wants only a unix or only a windows account.

1b. if you need a computer account, take the form to claudia first; then it trickles down to us.

3. after you have installed ssh, start the client program by double clicking or starting from the start/programs/ssh menu. click quick connect. enter one of the provided machine names in the hostname field. Enter your username. Click connect. A dialog will appear the first time you connect to a machine informing you that it does not recognize the host and asks you if you want to accept the key. Accept the key. You are prompted to enter you password in a dialog box. Enter your password. Upon successful authentication, you will be presented with a terminal window and a unix prompt.

5. Its my understanding that you do not have to have either a math department account or a NetID to register with ITEL and to thereby basically be a student. A UNM NetID is a general university computer and email account. A huge range of people are elligible for UNM NetIDs. http://www.unm.edu/cirt/accts/ Any student, Employee or Faculty are elligible for instance. A UNM NetID is required to use any computer lab or computer system or computing resource BESIDES the Math Department. (caveat is that there are other stand alone systems such as eece, cs, and ahpcc. also MVS, IDMS (for example). So the UNM NetID is a very general account and then there are many extra levels of specialization. The email address of the person with a UNM NetID is username@unm.edu. The email address of a person with a math department account is username@math.unm.edu. A Math Department account is required to use math department computing facilities. Math department computer facilities include email (service), math printers, math dialup, math cpu servers for mathematical research, math cpu servers for matlab computations, math department windows pcs for SAS computations and data analysis, the math department super computer, your own math department web page, etc.
8 How to add a command to my path in Unix?

Adding a command to your path in UNIX (by Dann Q Brewer).

If you ever enter a command at the UNIX prompt and you get a result simular to:

% fuzz
fuzz: Command not found

First, you have to find it. Try:

% whereis fuzz
fuzz: /usr/sbin/fuzz

If you get a result as above, and you do not want to
type in

% /usr/sbin/fuzz

every time, you must add /usr/sbin to your PATH environment variable. If you do not get a result such as this, the
command probably does not exist on the system.
Contact help@math.unm.edu

Adding /usr/sbin (or whatever directory your command was found in) is simply a matter of editting the startup file
for your login shell. Your login shell is probably tcsh or csh, so your startup file is ".cshrc" in the top level
of your home directory. You will need to modify the line that looks like

setenv PATH .:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/bin

Use your favorite editor to modify the above line to look like
setenv PATH .:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin

for the above example. Notice that directory paths are separated by the ':' character. The order these paths occur in is important because if there are two commands with the same name, you will get the command that is found in the first path to the left in your PATH variable setting. It is very common to have two commands of the same name, especially between /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin. The former will probably be the command that came with the native operating system, and the latter will probably be the command that we downloaded from the internet, usually from the GNU suite of software, probably equivalent to the native command but more up-to-date. Along that line, notice the '.:' at the beginning of the PATH setting. This means that any commands found in the directory you are currently in will be used before any of those of the same name in any of the other directory paths. If your PATH is set this way, and you compile your program and name the output "./rm" you will have somewhat of a mess, because whenever you try to use "rm" you will run your program instead. For example,

% rm rm

won't work. You will have to

% /usr/bin/rm rm

to get rid of it. So, it is probably a good idea to add new directory paths to the end of the PATH variable setting,
and keep '.' at the far right end.

After changing the PATH entry in your login shell startup file, you will need to activate the setting. This can be done by logging out and loggin back in, or by running the following command in each connection you have open:

% source .cshrc

Once this is done, you should be able to run you command without entering the full path of the command:

% which fuzz
/usr/sbin/fuzz

% fuzz
This is "fuzz," your handy-dandy fuzzy logic analyser.
Please enter your datafile name >

or something similar.

If you want other questions and answers listed here please email help@math.unm.edu.