Notebooks, Laptops and Other Self-Administered Machines

If you have a desk, you should have a computer of some sort on it provided by your supervisor. CSLab does not administer any desktop computers. You should speak to your Point of Contact (PoC) regarding problems with desktop workstations.

Useful Information

Here you'll find useful information if you plan to use your own equipment, but would still like to use some services provided by CSLab. Such services include network access, network shares with automatic backup, running Windows applications on Linux or vice versa, backup space, etc.

Using the CSLab Networks

Backing Up Data With Samba

Once you have configured your system to operate on the CSLab network, you should take advantage of the CSLab Samba server to mount your home directory in order save your important data files. In fact, we urge you to do so in order to avoid data loss. Consider the ramifications of losing your laptop or the hard-drive of your system failing: How will you recover your thesis, research project or other vital data? If your answer is that it would be very difficult or impossible, then please take the time to learn how to save your work to our centralized file servers via Samba. Not only do we backup up our file servers daily, we back them up to tapes that are securely stored in a different building. This means that we will often be able to restore lost data for you. However, we can only backup what you have saved in your home directory! So please learn how to use Samba.

Mapping Home Directory via Samba

In order to use configure your system to use Samba, please select the appropriate link.

A note on Docker

Docker, by default, uses a network range that conflicts with our 'red network' aka the laptop network, which is also generally used for any self-administered machine that is not in a research sandbox. If you allow docker to use the default network it chooses, you will experience problems if at any point you need to connect to a machine on the red network, or if your machine itself is on the red network.

We suggest that you alter your docker configuration to use a different network range which will not conflict with any in use within the department. To determine what network you should use, please contact your Point of Contact person.