Remote login to ECF
If you have internet access at home, you can log in to your ECF account and
work from home.
Unfortunately, I probably can't give you any assistance with this other than
the following advice, although you're welcome to ask (if you're a student in
one of my courses -- I can't undertake to answer such questions from everyone
who might happen upon this web page).
There is a remote login protocol called "ssh" which is supported by all the
ECF computers.
That is, the ECF computers
run the "server"; what you need for home is the "client" software, which is
the other side of a "server-client" connection over the internet.
(Similarly, your web browser is a "client" and it connects to a "web server"
over the internet.)
Possible client software (all freely distributable) is:
You should try to run applications such as web browsers on the machine you are
physically at; e.g. start netscape before doing a network login to
a(nother)
ECF host (or make sure that when you start it later, you are running it on the
local machine, not on the remote machine).
On the other hand, you may be able to work on your programs using a C compiler
at home.
Some of the issues here are:
- If your own computer ceases functioning for any reason, this won't be
accepted as a legitimate excuse for lateness.
The ECF machines are provided for you to do your course work on and they are
properly maintained, by professional sysadmins.
- I will likely not be able to help you with any technical problems with
your own equipment (although again, my students are welcome to ask for help
and I'll see if I have any relevant advice).
- To submit your programs, they have to be in your directory on the ECF
computers. So you will have to transfer them, and some people introduce
problems with their files when they do this. In particular, you will likely
have to make sure that they are transferred in "text mode" so as to avoid
interesting control characters cropping up at the ends of the lines.
Other problems people experience relate to non-standard character codes used
by macintoshes and especially ms-windows, notably for the directional quotes
and em-dash.
- Your programs have to compile and run on the ECF computers.
If you are using a C compiler at home, well, C compilers vary substantially in
quality and in the extent to which they correctly implement the C programming
language. Furthermore, a lot of C compilers these days allow "C++isms" of
various kinds, especially if those compilers are just restricted versions of
commercial C++ compilers from the same vendor, and you must write your
assignments for this course in C, not C++.
So it will be essential to make sure your programs function correctly on the ECF
computers, after you transfer them from home.
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