Honours

News

• 2009 accounts created and details emailed to students UCT email addresses (2 Feb 2009)
  
• 14 new machines were installed, very old machines removed. (Jan 2009)
  

Accounts

Each Honours student has been allocated a CS Unix and a CS Windows account. These accounts can be used to log into the workstations in the Honours Lab, as well as to access other departmental IT facilities. For more information on the authentication system see Authentication Credentials.

Honours students are allocated new accounts based on first initial and surname. Old student number accounts (for your undergraduate days) will be deleted early in February 2009.

Your new account details were emailed to your UCT email address on Monday, 2 February 2009.

Ubuntu users, please note:
In 2009 we changed the way we mount server home directories on Ubuntu workstations.

Instead of mounting all file server home directories on all workstations via NFS as we did in the past, we now mount your file server home directory from casper2  via CIFS/SMB when you log into a workstation. This provides us with a number of performance as well as security benefits but has the following implications which you should be aware of:

•  For this to work, you need to make sure that your Windows password is the same as your unix password as the Samba server makes use of the Windows authentication environment. If your passwords are not the same, the mount will silently fail. When you change one of your passwords, please be sure to manually change the other as well. 
• Where as previously the file server directory was mounted directly onto /home, this is no longer possible as the CIFS file system does not support certain types of files like symlinks. Therefore, your fileserver home directory in mounted on the casper2 sub-directory within your home directory. To save on the server you must save in the (properly mounted) casper2 sub-directory. Anything you save elsewhere on the workstation will be saved to the local hard disk of the workstation which is not backed-up and will be lost when the workstation is re-imaged.
  

Honours Lab

The Honours class have a dedicated computing laboratory - known as the Honours Lab with 41 workstations running Windows XP and Ubuntu and a black and white laser printer. For more information about the lab see the Honours Lab page.

Mailing Lists

The Honours class has its own email mailing list - hons@cs.uct.ac.za. All Honours students have automatically been subscribed to this mailing list using their UCT email address.

Your can use the administrative interface to manage your subscription to this list.

This mailing list is administered by the Honours course convenor, Edwin Blake. Please refer list queries to him.

Course Convenor

Edwin Blake is the Honours course convenor for 2009.