Computing Center
	Computer Facilities Local Machines Report a Problem

Local Information on the Department's Unix machines

This work in progress addresses things to try when trouble/curiosity strikes.

Command not found or permission denied

A common problem is with the path. you can change this by editing your .cshrc file, then source ~/.cshrc, then rehash.

A .cshrc file which should be satisfactory for most users is here basic cshrc file. copy (cp) it to your home directory as .cshrc.

Another possibility for the permission denied message is that the command (your own program?) is not executable. chmod +x command.

If a directory with the same name as the program appears earlier in your path you will also get the permission denied error message. change your path. In particular "." should not be in your path preferable) or if it is it should be last.

Command results in error message, how to use a command

man pages are your friends, try man tcsh to learn about the tcsh shell (most users default shell). Other sources of documentation on the system are info pages, you can info to browse or info a2ps to see the docs for the a2ps program using the info (emacs-like) browser. There is also searchable hypertext sun provided documentation at the local url http://laplace.stat.cwru.edu:8888 . Sometimes what you need cannot be found there, quite often useful system stuff. A good alternative place to look is The Solaris 2 FAQ search engine.

Printer spewing garbage

The cause is sending binary files to the printer. Don't do this!. The effect is to waste paper and to prevent other people from using the printer. The printer will accept postscript or text. If your are unsure about what kind of document you have use the file command.

In order to solve this problem 2 things must be done.

The first thing to do is to take the printer offline, remove the paper tray, also disconnect the twisted pair ethernet cable at the end. Once it is offline hold the shift key and then simultaneously the reset key. There are some brief instructions for this procedure attached to the printer. The purpose of this procedure is to flush the binary data from the printers memory.

The other required step is that the offending print job must be stopped, this is best done by the person who submitted the job. Use cancel -u login_name to cancel all of your print jobs. (lprm may also be used, but cancel is better.) To view which jobs are being printed and to perhaps identify whom has sent the offending job use the command lpstat -o all on each machine (lpq can also be used). Here is a list of machines (it is possible that you will not be able to log into sun-- you should know if you can, besides no one that uses sun ever makes mistakes.)

foreach i (`cat ~pete/computers`)
foreach? echo $i
foreach? ssh $i 'lpstat -o all'
foreach? end

Once you are certain that the offending job has been removed and that the printer memory has been cleared then put the printer back on the network.

Screen Locked

Some idiot has been away for 2 days having left the screen in locked state, thus preventing other users from using the console.

• Hit him over the head with a stick until he agrees that it is a bad idea
• Don't do this yourself

Unfortunately you either have to find the the person who left the console or someone with root privileges to unlock the screen. Root can use the root passwd to get in unless xlock was used to lock the screen. To make sure you do not do this by accident, follow the following pictorial guidelines. (The problem is that the default is for the screen to automatically lock after 15 minutes).

How to Unlock the screen

Launch the style manager.

Launch the screen widget.

Turn off locking.

Help!

If you cannot find the solution to your problem here and you have made other reasonable attempts to solve it, fill out a Problem Report (internal use only).