SB 108 lab CS Department Computer Lab

General Information

SB 108 Plaque

The Computer Science department computer lab is located in SB 108, along the northern edge of the Stuart Building. SB 108 is a closed lab, and is only accessible to students under faculty or TA supervision, typically during lab sessions or office hours. Open labs are maintained by OTS in SB 112 and a variety of other locations on campus.

SB 108 lab machines (and other general purpose CS department course servers) are administered by Michael Saelee <lee@iit.edu> and Upendra Gandhi <ugandhi@iit.edu>. If you've any questions or feedback regarding the lab, or would like to obtain an account on one of the CS department servers, please shoot us an e-mail!

Schedule


Policies & Usage

iMacs

Policies

For general lab policies, please see the OTS lab and computer resource usage policies.

In addition to the above, students should take note of the following:

  1. Students may only use the lab when an instructor and/or TA is present.
  2. SB 108 computers are for coursework only! (Occasionally, special events are scheduled in the lab and are, of course, exceptions to this rule.)

Instructors and TAs, please help enforce these policies! If you are leaving the lab, do make sure the lab is empty and the door closes securely. If you need to access the lab (and your ID is not currently registered with facilities), please see Ann McBroom for a key.

Dual-Booting

Many courses will require that you use an application specifically installed on one of the two operating systems loaded on the machines. To do this, reboot from the login screen and, when prompted by the bootloader, use the keyboard to select the Apple (for OS X) or Microsoft Windows (for Windows XP) logo to boot into the desired operating system.

If you are unable to get to the login screen to reboot a system, you can hold down the power button behind the lower left hand side of the display for a few seconds to power it down unconditionally. Press the button again to start it up and get to the bootloader. Make sure there isn't someone using the machine first, though!

Accounts

For general use there are guest accounts available on all machines -- instructions for logging in as guest follow:

Please note that when logged in as guest all work saved during the session will be deleted upon logging out. Be sure to save your work elsewhere (e.g., on a USB drive) if you need to hang on to it!

Accounts on the domain controller may also be obtained by current students (or by faculty for students enrolled in their courses). These accounts will allow students to save private data and application preferences across login sessions, subject to a disk quota. Unless other arrangements are made, all such accounts will be deleted at the end of each semester.

Using the projector

Connecting to the projector requires that the Elmo system be turned on and set to "PC" using the touch panel on the instructor's desk. Whether booted in OS X or Windows, the VGA cable should be connected to the back of the iMac using the attached mini-displayport converter.

Under OS X, use the "Displays" tab from the System Preferences application to adjust the projected view. System Preferences can be accessed from the "Apple" menu up in the left corner of the menu bar.

Instructions on how to connect the system to the projector under Windows XP should be posted by the desktop, and can also be viewed as a PDF document.

Applications

XCode screenshot

All the machines in SB 108 are dual-boot Windows XP / Mac OS X 10.6. The applications installed on each operating system are listed below (this is not an exhaustive list):

Windows XPMac OS X 10.6

Hardware

iMac side

There are a total of 31 iMacs (including the instructor's desktop) installed in SB 108, each with the following specifications:

The machines are named, appropriately, after an assortment of programming languages — some esoteric, some generally loved, and yet others that programmers love(d) to hate — see how many you can identify in the list: ada, algol, arc, basic, c, caml, clojure, dylan, eiffel, erlang, fortran, haskell, icon, io, java, lisp, lua, ml, pascal, perl, pli, prolog, python, ruby, scala, scheme, smalltalk, snobol, tcl, tex, verilog, vhdl.

There is an HP LaserJet 9050 that can be used for printing in the lab — note that OTS print quotas are not in effect in SB 108; please don't abuse printing privileges!

For our UNIX course server (ada.cs.iit.edu) we are running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on a Dell PowerEdge with 2 dual core 3GHz Intel Xeon processors and 4GB of RAM. Another Dell PowerEdge is used for the SB 108 domain controller, running RedHat Linux and serving samba shares off two RAID-mirrored drives.