Introduction to LIONS

Everyone is encouraged to visit the LIONS web pages for current system news and status as well as useful instructions and documentation. New users, please be sure to read this document. LIONS users are also encouraged to subscribe to the lions-announce@list.odu.edu mailing list by either sending a message with the word "subscribe" in the subject to lions-announce-request@list.odu.edu or by visiting http://list.odu.edu/listinfo/lions-announce. If you have been given access to the LIONS high performance computing resources, please subscribe to supercomputer-users@list.odu.edu as well.

Requesting A LIONS2 Account

Activation of your LIONS2 accounts is now processed via MIDAS (Monarch IDentification and Authorization System).

A LIONS2 account is needed to access the "General Purpose" UNIX resources or to access the "High Performance" UNIX resources supported by OCCS. Although any current faculty, staff or student is eligible for a LIONS2 account, only a small percentage actually need one. Please make sure that YOU need this kind of account before you have one set up. For information on how to set up your LIONS2 account, please go to this document.

When you activate your LIONS2 account from MIDAS, it may take upwards of ten to thirty minutes for your account to activate on the LIONS2 side. Please be patient during this process. If it exceeds thirty minutes, please send an email to 'unixhelp@odu.edu' explaining the situation.

Please note that even though you can set up your LIONS2 account thru MIDAS, it can not and does not give access to certain resources, such as departmental software, nor does it assume any quota beyond the system defaults. To get access to departmental software or to increase your quota once you have set up your LIONS2 account, please send an email to unixhelp@odu.edu to request such access.

Accessing Your LIONS2 Account

You may access your LIONS account any number of ways. While there are several systems in the LIONS architecture, the preferred system to use for remote access is sol-login.lions2.odu.edu. This could change in the future. If you have access to department LIONS clients, you may use them as well. You can access most LIONS systems remotely using either "telnet" or "ssh". The "rlogin" protocol suite is not supported. You can also access LIONS remotely in a graphical session via the X-Window network protocol using the Windows-based X-Win32 or PuTTY programs. Information about X-Win32 and PuTTY can be found on the LIONS web page. You can also "ftp" files to or from your LIONS account, but only if you point your FTP client to ftp.lions2.odu.edu. Please see the Remote Access pages for more information on how to do this.

Email

Your LIONS account, as a UNIX account, has email capability even though your official University email is provided by Lotus Notes. If you do not plan on reading your email through LIONS, please create a .forward file to forward your email to another address. Instructions for doing this are on the LIONS web page under the Email section of the LIONS2 Services section. If you wish to access your LIONS mailbox remotely, you may use IMAP from imap.lions2.odu.edu. (POP is no longer supported.) On campus users may use smtp-auth.odu.edu for their SMTP gateway. For security reasons, off campus users must use their ISP's SMTP server for an SMTP gateway.

Web Pages

Faculty and staff may request the ability to host a university related web page from their LIONS account via a ~public_html directory. In most cases students may obtain this ability through the authorization of a department representative. In neither case is the ability on by default unless it was requested at the time the account was created. Just having a public_html directory will not make its contents accessible via the web. More information is available on the LIONS web pages at this link. Please note that this facility was intended for setting up pages for distributing research results, and is not set up for hosting complete web sites, though that is possible. If you need assistance with your web pages, we recommend that you investigate what OCCS has to offer in planning, designing, and deployment of your web information - please send an email to webadmin@odu.edu for more information regarding these offerings.

Changing Your Password

You may or may not be required to change your LIONS password when you first log in. In either case, you should change it from the one given here. At the present time, you may change your password either using MIDAS or you can change it using the UNIX "kpasswd" command. (Just one word of caution - if you change your LIONS password using the "kpasswd" command, the next time you change it in MIDAS, it will sync up your LIONS password with your MIDAS password. You have been warned.) Please make sure you use a strong password. Do not use names or other "dictionary" words. If we guess your password doing an automated password strength check, your account will be locked and you will have to pick up a new password in person.

Disk Quotas

By default, student account disk quotas are 256MB, while faculty and staff disk quotas are 512MB. If you are a faculty or staff member and you run out of space, please send your request to unixhelp@odu.edu along with a brief justification for the additional space. If you are a student and you run out of space, please have your instructor or faculty advisor make the request for you.

High Performance Computing resources

Once you have a LIONS account you automatically have access to the High Performance Computing environment which includes access to  Hydra, a Sun Microsystems SunFire 2900 and Belize, a Sun Microsystems V890. For more information, please look at the 'HPC Docs' section for more information regarding the HPC environment. A reminder is that the Sol-login boxes are to be used for reading email, editing, compiling and job preparation. They are NOT to be used for running compute-intensive jobs. If we catch any compute-intensive jobs running on those boxes, they will immediately be killed and one warning will be sent to those responsible.

What You Should Know

The UNIX Support Group is unable to provide instructional or tutorial services to individual users or groups. If you are unfamiliar with UNIX, we've provided links to some web based UNIX tutorials. To view them, click on the UNIX Tutorials section.