The lab equipment is placed in ECS South 4.216. We have two sets of equipment that allow two different groups to work on their lab experiments simultaneously. Each set has 4 Cisco routers, 4 Dell PCs running Linux, 4 Ethernet switches.
The equipment configuration is somehow different from the sample equipment configuration that is presented in your textbook. We very recently updated the hardware equipment in the lab (we removed old PCs that were used in the previous semesters in this course and put new PCs in use) and did some major changes to how the new equipment will be used for the labs. We will go over how the equipment is to be used at the beginning of the semester. I will also provide a rough description of this below for your reference.
PCs run CentOS as native OS. You will login to the systems with your NetID and password. For the labs, we will use virtual machines (running CentOS) as lab PCs in our exercises. Below is the steps that you will need to take to create your own copy of the virtual PCs to be used for the lab exercises:
1. Copy /vmsource/cs4396 to /vm/<user ID>
2. copy /vmsource/.vmware to ~/.vmware. Once finished, change the
permissions so that others may not use the VM. chmod -R 700 /vm/<userID>
1. and 2. above can be achieved by running the shell script cs4396.sh in /vmsource
directory. The script checks if you have the /vm/<user ID> directory under your
name and whether it contains the above files and copies them over if not.
3. To SSH and port X from another machine, first allow incoming X
sessions by
xhost +
and then execute the following
ssh -X <user ID>@<PC name>
export DISPLAY=<local machine name>:0.0
then start whatever GUI is needed.
4. When you start up vmware, you'll need to tell it where to find the
virtual machine, which is located at /vm/<user ID>/cs4396
5. When starting the Virtual machine for the first time, it will ask
whether it was moved or copied, you should answer with copied.
6. When the machine is finished booting, the default password is
password, there will be a mount under /mnt/hgfs named "Home Directory Mount"
which passes all the information saved in ~/Desktop, the desktop of your home
directory.
The hostnames of the linux PCs in the lab are named as set1pc1, set1pc2, and so on. You login to these systems with your UTD account info. These systems have full connection to the Internet and can be remotely accessed from other UTD network machines via ssh.
As you will see in the lab, the linux PCs are connected to UTD campus network thru white colored ethernet cables. The cables are coming out of the on-board ethernet port at the back of each PC and going to the sockets that are hanging from the ceiling of the lab. YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO TOUCH/PLUG/UNPLUG THESE WHITE CABLES AT ANY TIME. During the labs, you will only work with the two ethernet ports that are installed on the PCs at the bottom back of each PC. You should not be unplugging the ethernet cables that are connected to on-board ports on PCs.