How To..
How to solve general computing problems.
Listed below are some instructional guides for solving various computer software issues.
We offer support for the following systems:
- Windows XP, Vista
- MacOS X
- RedHat Enterprise
- Fedora
- Ubuntu
- Centos
General Information
- How to configure Email clients
- SpamAssassin
- Information regarding our department's supported email spam filter.
- Printing from Network Printers
- Everything you need to know about printing.
- Network and Internet Problem Solving
- Information about problems with on campus and off campus internet connections as well as monitoring information on the campus network hardware.
Linux
Internet / Network
- Configure Internet and Network in BPS
- Information on how to configure your network settings.
- Incorrect Hostname Mapping
- Some linux distributions do not correctly map the system’s hostname for proper use in a networked environment.
- Mounting SMB Shares
- You have resources being served remotely from Windows systems via SMB. You'd like to access them from your Linux system.
Software
- Securing GRUB
- GRUB, the standard Linux bootloader, allows one to pass a number of options to init while booting.
- Rescue boot from a RedHat CD
- Mathematica fonts and Printing
- How to set up keyfile-based SSH logins between Unix/Linux systems
Other
- Speed Up IDE Disk Access
- By default, some linux distributions rely on somewhat conservative settings for accessing IDE devices. Unfortunately, this may cause some potential, unnecessary slowdown.
- Monitoring and Cancelling Print Jobs
Macintosh
MacOS X
- Connecting to Windows Servers
- Installing X11
- How to run standard Unix applications through an X11 server on your Mac.
- Installing Network Print Queues
Windows
Internet / Network
- VPN client connect
- Use VPN if you are away from a local network or domain and still want to access shared or personal files stored on that network or domain. A VPN connection can be made across the internet from a dial-up, broadband or LAN connection and uses encryption to maintain security.
Software
- Gimp
- Gimp has many of the graphic-manipulation capabilities found in expensive professional programs, but it's free!
- TeX Install: [ MiKTeX | ReVTeX | WinEDT ]
- XWin Install: [ Config | Fonts | SSH ]
SSH
- Clients
- SSH is a Secure implementation of a remote UNIX shell. It is intended as a replacement for various ways of accessing a UNIX system remotely, such as telnet, rsh, and rexec.
- Configuring SSH for Public-Key Authentication (Passowrd-less)
- How to configure SSH to authenticate to a server using a public/private key pair with no password.
- Remote Connect
- Installing SSH to connect using a secure connection to remote computers.
- Using SCP on SSH for Workstations
- SCP is secure file copy and is included with the SSH Secure Shell client. With this you can securely move files to, from, and within a server running SSH.
- Tunneling TCP port through an SSH tunnel
- Standard FTP/IMAP4/POP3/SMTP are not secure in any fashion-- that is, they are unencrypted protocols and as such all email and password information transmitted via them is viewable by any person or machine between the client and server. Solutions to this, such as FTP/IMAP4/POP3 and SMTP over SSL are available but not yet widely implemented.
Other Guides and Tutorials
-
If you're looking for information on how to use a department resource,
or step-by-step instructions using a piece of software or just generally
using your computer, you'll find our most common guides here.
- On-line Help with Unix Programs
- (e.g., typical Unix commands, LaTeX, pine, htmlchek, vi)
- MSU Computer Servers, Dial-up and Pilot System
- PDF File Creation Tools
- For use in preparing project descriptions for NSF grant proposals, for example.
- Network settings for P-A building devices
- PostScript file creation
- A very extensive and well-documented description of problems and how to avoid them, prepared by Randy Herber of the CDF experiment at Fermilab.
- Web authoring examples, demonstrations and templates