The Department of Computer Science has a number of student computing laboratories on the St. George campus. Together, they make up the CDF ("Computing Discipline Facility"). The computers in our CDF labs run a Linux operating system.
Key announcements are also summarized in the message you see when you login to cdf.
BA2210, BA2220, BA2240, BA2270, BA3175, BA3185, BA3195, and the Great Hall with between 12 to 24 machines each.
Accounts are prefixed by ‘c#’, where # corresponds to the last digit of the year you get your account (eg 5 for 2005) and then the first six letters of your last name, as it appears on your student card. If the first six characters are shared by more than one person, accounts created later will have the last character shifted farther down in the alphabet: clarke, clarkf, … , clarkh.
If your last name is shorter than 6 letters, letters from your first name on your student card will be used to fill.
| Name | Account/Login |
| CLARKE JAMES | c5clarke |
| CLARKE THOMAS | c5clarkf |
| LI JENNIFER | c5lijenn |
When your account is created, you will be sent email (to the address you supplied in ROSI) with the details. If you forget your account name, please use CDF Username Lookup.
Your password will initially be your student number, but you must change it the first time you log in.
See Log in to see how you log in using your account name and password.
Your actual disk and print quotas are set depending on the number of courses you are enrolled in. Thus, if you are doing more courses, you get more quota.
If you use up your disk quota then you can rescue yourself simply by deleting large files that you don’t need any more. Be more careful with your printing, though: once printed, a page is gone. You can buy more pages if you like, but it’s better to be prudent with your printing. Instructions on buying more pages are given in the on-line CDF FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).
Each time you login, you are agreeing to the rules of conduct in the labs. You can read the rules here.
The rules are serious, as they are there to protect students and equipment, and violations could lead to an appearance before the University Tribunal and to a punishment such as lack of access to the cdf labs and academic penalties ranging from 0 in the course to expulsion from the University.
Your instructors will also give you rules, and these should be available from your course web sites.
People who write things are usually proud of what they have produced. Its quality reveals their ability, and its ownership may produce income or academic credit. It is wrong to take for yourself ownership of someone else’s work, and wrong also to allow your own work to stand in for someone else’s.
Don’t Copy
It is also an offence to permit another student to copy your own work. If you need advice on what is allowed and what is not, consult your instructor.
If you leave your account logged in on an unattended computer, we will assume that you meant to allow someone to copy your work. That is, if someone does copy your work, you will be considered to be guilty of an academic offence.
It is an offence under the University’s Code of Student Conduct to possess property that is not your own. This includes unauthorized copies of communications programs and of the programming environment used in your course.
You may, of course, copy files provided by your instructor for particular assignments.
1. Check that the computer is ready to use
If the screen is dark when you arrive at the computer, that means the computer’s "screen saving" feature has taken over, to save energy and reduce wear on the monitor. To reactivate the screen, press any key on the keyboard.
If that doesn't work, try moving the mouse. And if that doesn’t work, check that the green "on" lights are glowing on both the monitor and the main (CPU) box. If not, press the power buttons on both.
Please do not switch the computer off under any circumstance. If it is already off, as mentioned above, you may switch it on.
If the previous user forgot to log out, you will see a complex screen desktop showing a lot of icons and windows. You must log this person off by clicking the menu icon in the bottom left of the screen desktop, and then selecting logout from the menu, and confirming the operation. After a short pause you should see the login prompt.
PLEASE NOTE. You will not see anything appearing in the password box. This is a security feature, so people cannot even see how long your password is.
Make sure you enter your login and password exactly, including upper and lower case.
The first time you log in, you will be required to change your password.
Problems.
A possible problem, if you can't log in, might be that you used the letter l ("ell") instead of the digit one, 1. Similarly, you might have pressed the letter O ("oh") instead of the digit zero, 0.
3. Doing your work
Once the Window Manager has started, you will be able to start your work. There are a number of ways that you can start programs. You will be familiar with the first three.
4. What if things go wrong?
If you think a program is misbehaving, there are a number of ways you can stop it. This does not include rebooting the computer. When running a Unix operating system, there are very few times you should ever need to reboot a computer. In particular, when using the CDF computers, there may be someone else running a process on the computer you happen to be using, so you must not reboot it.
You can try the following:
There are others ways to stop programs or processes, and you can read HOWTO Stop Processes on Unix for more advanced instructions.
You will find that you can customize KDE in many different ways, and KDE comes with a helpful utility (see Settings in the KMenu). If at any time you want to return to the KDE defaults that were set up for you, you just need to click on the bell icon in the bottom panel of your desktop.
The CDF system changes when the system administrators think of better ways to do things, and this page may not be totally correct. You may hear about changes from messages on the system, or by simply noticing the new behaviour of a command or the existence of a new icon.
Often you won’t need to worry about this, but sometimes a command will need the complete name of a file, so you will need to include the directory as well as the basic file name.
This is one area where Unix operating systems and Microsoft Windows do treat things differently. In Unix, your home directory is just another directory on the system, except that you are the only person who has access to it.
Where is it?
at the command line. You will see something like
Your particular path will end with your login. NOTE the / separators between the directories. This is different from Microsoft Windows.
The "Home" icon is also a shortcut to your home directory, and will display its contents.
The administrators let you know as you login if you are over quota, so that you can immediately delete some files. Read the FAQ about Disk Quotas to find out more.
Don’t forget to log off! Otherwise, someone else can take advantage of your work. And if they do, you too will be responsible. If you leave your account logged in on an unattended computer, we will assume that you meant to allow someone to copy your work. That is, if someone does copy your work, you will be considered to be guilty of an academic offence.
Obviously, you need a secure password: secret and hard to "crack". It is up to you to keep it secret, and it is also up to you to choose a password that is hard for anyone to guess—even someone who knows you well.
Could your password be guessed by someone who has stolen your wallet or backpack? It’s not a good one. Could your mother guess it? It’s not a good one.
And don’t tell it to your mother, either. Don’t tell it to your TA. Don’t tell it to your instructor. These people will always have you type it yourself if they need you to log in. Don’t even tell a system administrator. (System administrators don’t need your password, and don’t want to know it; they will stare at the ceiling while you type it in, if they’ve asked you to log in.)
If you accidentally reveal your password to someone, change it right away. If you accidentally find out someone’s password, tell them so they can change it right away.
The first time you log in to CDF, you must change your password.
You will be asked to read the CDF Rules, and then to change your password. You have to enter your old password, and then the new one twice, to make sure you’re typing it consistently.
Your new password will only be accepted if it passes a program designed to crack passwords. If it does not, you will be asked to enter another one. Good password rules require a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters (from the usual European alphabet), numbers and punctuation (but no spaces). It must be between 7-8 characters in length. The idea is to make it harder for an attacker to guess your password: "hiMom!" or "TrustNo1" are harder to generate automatically than "mymother" and "TRUSTME".
On the other hand, you need to be able to remember your password. Pick something that’s not totally random, such as a phone number combined with a name ("978-Fido") or a derivative of a memorable phrase (eg. Wylfwt? — Would you like fries with that?). Choose your password before going to CDF to change it, so you’ll have a clearer idea of whether you really can remember it.
We can’t tell you what it was. Show your photo ID card to a system administrator in their office in BA3224 to have it reset to your student number. You must then reset it to what you want.
When you’re unhappy or confused, you can send a query or complaint—a "gripe"—to the system administrators. Send e-mail to:
admin@cdf.utoronto.ca
But if it’s your course you want to gripe about, don’t mail admin. Instead, contact your instructor.
| Location | Closest Printer |
| 2nd Floor, Bahen | p2210a and p2210b in BA2210 |
| 3rd Floor, Bahen | p3185a in BA3185 |
| Gerstein Lab | gerstein in room 2360, the Gerstein lab |
Whenever you print something, the pages are counted and your printquota is reduced accordingly. There may be times when you want to cancel a print job. Please read the FAQ about Printing to find out more.
Printer troubles?
Your e-mail address
A sender outside CDF will need to know your e-mail address before sending you a message. If your account name is "c5clarke", then your full e-mail address is
c5clarke@cdf.utoronto.ca
As part of the first lab exercise you do in CSC108, you will learn to forward mail to where you regularly read your mail. Of course, you can choose to read mail on the CDF system, but it is essential that you do read your mail, as your instructors use this medium to communicate with you. If you want to change or create your .forward file later in the year, read How do I forward e-mail?
Occasionally your instructor may send you a file by e-mail. When you receive the message, you have to get its contents into an ordinary file, rather than one of the mailboxes that mail manages. To do so, use the "Save As …" command in mail’s File menu. Make sure to pick a sensible folder to leave the message in, or you’ll never find it again.
Many people are a little careless in using e-mail. If you find yourself becoming angry or confused, it’s better to contact the other person directly or by telephone to clarify the situation.
Do not use e-mail for very confidential messages. It may seem like real postal mail, but it does not carry the same presumption of privacy. Your mail consists of files stored on computers and disks owned by the university, and it can be read by authorized University employees. Ordinarily we won’t read your mail; we’d rather not intrude if we don’t have to. But if there is reason to suspect you or your friends of an academic offence or misuse of CDF, then we may very well read your mail, and you won’t be warned beforehand.
News items are less personal and more public than e-mail messages, and can be more up-to-date than web pages, so they have a separate role to play. They are useful in making announcements to a wide audience, such as an entire class, or even all users of the system. Because readers can also respond by posting their own news items, the news can support debates that are often a useful adjunct to classroom discussions. The first-year courses generally use a bulletin board for news, and you will be given the information about where to find your bulletin borad by your instructor.
You can read news using Thunderbird, or you can connect from a browser at home. Please go to FAQ about News to find out more.
You can choose to subscribe or unsubscribe to newsgroups. Make sure you subscribe to at least these groups:
But when you’re ready, you can post an article from your browser, or by e-mailing it to the appropriate newsgroup, giving an address followed by "@cdf". For example, to post to ut.cdf.general, send mail to
ut.cdf.general@cdf.utoronto.ca
The content of the mail message becomes the content of the news item.
An Internet account will also allow you to exchange e-mail with your instructor or other CDF users.
You can also do your Java programming on your home computer. If you have a powerful enough PC or Macintosh, you will be able to run the java IDE, and DrJava, the programming environment provided at CDF; these are free. The links to the software will be provided on the appropriate course web site.
Refer to CDF Working From Home for many useful items.
Remember that you are able to submit assignments from anywhere by connecting the the CDF Secure Website.