RNL

RNL stands for Rede das Novas Licenciaturas (literal translation: Network of New Bachelor's Degrees). Created in the early 90s, it provided support to new Técnico courses - LEEC, LEGI and LEIC - predating our department (DEI) by a few years.

We're a team of students, responsible for managing all computer equipment and scheduling activities (classes, evaluations and others) in Pavilhão de Informática I.

Warnings and news are regularly posted in our website (in portuguese - we promise a translation is on the roadmap).

Labs

All computer labs dual boot between Linux and Windows. You can login in with your IST ID (always remember to logout)! You'll need to activate some services before you can start using them.

Your files are stored in AFS, where you have a 10GB quota (if you exceed it you can ask DSI for more); so you can use any computer in any OS and all your stuff will always be there.

Some laboratories have ports available for personal usage. These are properly marked.

Space A (Lab 15) is a special case, since it has no computers. It functions mostly as a study space.

You can find a full list of our laboratories, with computer specs and counts in our website.

Usage Prerequisites

Before you can use the labs you need to activate both AFS and Shell services.

You'll need a device with internet access and a web browser (your phone is enough).

If you're at Técnico you can login to the temporary welcome user (password is GoodLuck).

1. Go to https://selfservice.dsi.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/ (you'll need to log in with your Fénix account). This page is only available in portuguese so you may want to use a Chromium-based browser to translate it.

2. Find the AFS service and click the Activar button

3. Wait for the page to load or things will break. DO NOT TRY TO ACTIVATE MULTIPLE SERVICES SIMULTANEOUSLY

4. Go back to the previous page with a link called Voltar ao início

5. Find the Shell service and click the Activar button

6. Wait (again) for the page to load (don't blame us, it's not our creation)

7. Go back to the previous page with a link called Voltar ao início

8. That's it! You can now freely use the labs. If you're using or next to a lab PC right now try it out.

Do contact us if you have any trouble!

Thank you Emil for the screencaps!

Rules

• Don't eat or drink (except water);
• Don't unplug peripherals from the computers;
• Don't unplug network cables from the computers or try to use unmarked network ports with your own (it won't work, and produce annoying beeps and annoyed sysadmins in our room);
• Don't change the layout of the tables with computers or move the computers themselves;
• You may reboot the computers to change between OSes, but never turn them off (especially by force): you may be hampering your classmates work in the cluster.

Access outside class

To open an empty laboratory ask the security guard at the entrance. You'll need to sign a responsability form (valid for one year), and will be responsible for enforcing the rules in the open lab. Don't forget to ask the security guard to close it when you're done (or bring someone with you to pass your burden of responsability to them).

We also make our computing resources available remotely through a variety of ways.

Cluster (Slurm)

You can launch jobs with Slurm in cluster.rnl.tecnico.ulisboa.pt (accessible via SSH).

Unfortunately, it's very hard to give cluster jobs access to AFS without exposing your password, so you can use a GlusterFS volume instead, mounted on the cluster access node and all cluster nodes in /mnt/cirrus. When logging in to the cluster access node, your own folder will automatically be created in /mnt/cirrus/Y/Z/istXXXXYZ (where istXXXXYZ is your IST ID).

More information is available on our website.

SSH

From the cluster access node (cluster.rnl.tecnico.ulisboa.pt), you can SSH into all LAB PCs with your IST-ID.

This is useful for quick tasks that don't require the full power of Slurm.

VNC

Upon request, we can provide VNC access to the LABs.

The VNC server will only be listening to local connections, so you must proxy your connection somehow. We recommend using SSH tunelling like so:

ssh -L 5959:localhost:5900 -J istXYZ@cluster.rnl.tecnico.ulisboa.pt istXYZ@labNpM

where istXYZ is your IST ID, 5959 is the port on your computer where you will connect your VNC client, and labNpM the hostname of the lab computer you wish to connect to. With this setup, your VNC client (e.g. TigerVNC should be pointed to localhost:5959.

Since we're using the cluster access node to jump to the lab PC, you'll need to enter your Fénix password twice (and then again through VNC).

We recommend connecting to computers in LABs 2 and 3, as they won't be used in person by anyone and do not participate in the cluster. They will be kept online for this purpose.

Getting Help

You can find us on the 2nd floor of Pavilhão de Informática III in the room 2.05. You can find our office hours next to the door and in our website.

At any time you can also drop us an email at rnl@rnl.tecnico.ulisboa.pt.

Frequent Issues

I'm having trouble with eduroam/my IST email

You should contact DSI as they are the ones that administer these services. That said, we can always try to help.

I can't login in the labs

If you already activated the required services for the labs, and cannot login into both Windows and Linux, there's a high chance you've run out of space in your AFS area.

You'll need to login through a text console: either ssh(1) into sigma/nexus, or switch to a virtual terminal under Linux in the labs.

You can switch to a different virtual terminal using Ctrl+Alt+F<n>, where <n> is the number of the terminal (7 is the one with the graphical interface).

From there you can find out what files/folders are taking the most space, and remove them with rm(1). You should strive to keep at the very least 25MB of free space.

Common folders that take up a lot of space:

• .cache (application cache, including web browsers, normally safe to delete)
• .m2 (maven package repositories)
• .local/share/Trash (recycling bin)
• .eclipse
• .local/share/akonadi (Akonadi's database)
• Android SDK, wherever you installed it

If you need the space, you can also ask DSI to raise your quota, or store non-essential data (read "I can live without a backup") in your gluster home from our cluster, or locally in /var/tmp.

I locked myself out of my AFS area

You should contact DSI as they are the ones that administer this service. We do not have access to user's AFS areas.

My mouse/keyboard don't work on Windows

As with many other problems in this operating system, a simple reboot should fix it. If not, contact us.

I get a profile-in-use error when opening Google Chrome on Windows

If you get a message like the following

The profile appears to be in use by process XXXX on host linXXpX.
If you are sure no other processes are using this profile, delete the
file /afs/ist.utl.pt/users/Y/Z/ist1XXXXX/.config/google-chrome/SingletonLock and relaunch Google Chrome.

and you are not logged in on Windows with Chrome open in another computer, you can safely delete the referenced file and try again.

I get an "unknown RPC error" when trying to login to Windows

Integrated login failed: unknown RPC error (-1765328347)

This message appears when there's a connection problem to the AFS servers. Try again later (in 5-25min).

If the problem persists, contact us.

I get a Group Policy Client error when trying to login to Windows

The Group Policy Client service failed the logon. Access is denied

This error ocurrs when there are synchronization problems with your data in the end of your session.

You'll need to delete the NTUSER.DAT and ntuser.pol files in ~/RNL-Windows/Windows-Profile/.V6, which will make you loose all registry-based configuration on Windows.

If this does not solve the problem, you can move up and delete the whole ~/RNL-Windows/Windows-Profile folder (which still does not include user data such as documents, project source code, etc.).

What Java versions are available in the labs?

Each directory in /usr/lib/jvm corresponds to a different Java version/installation.

To use it, you should update your JAVA_HOME and PATH variables accordingly:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/XXXX
export PATH="$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH"

This change will only apply to your current terminal session, to make it permanent you should add those lines to your ~/.bash_profile.

Why is it forbidden to shutdown lab computers?

All lab computers are part of a cluster, and accessible remotely; therefore by powering it off you may be impeding someone else's work.

However they are not on all the time: after being idle for a while, they are shut down (and brought back up when necessary).

How can I see how much space I have left in my AFS area?

Run fs listquota -human on a terminal.

You can also use du(1) or ncdu(1) (a du(1) ncurses-based interface) to find out how much space each file/folder is using.