Xeon Cluster Miscellaneous FAQ

How do I control my environment?

The software environment on Tungsten is managed with SoftEnv. For more information see Managing your Environment (SoftEnv).

What does the error message "Unable to load SoftEnv system." mean?

This message usually indicates that you are at or over your disk quota in your home directory. Save files to the mass storage system (UniTree) and/or delete them to get under the quota limit. Information on home directory quotas is available here.

Is there a default .cshrc and .login available?

On NCSA machines, the directory /u/skel contains skeleton .cshrc and .login files that are given to all new logins.

How do I update my NCSA email forwarding address?

On an NCSA HPC machine, edit the file /var/forward/$USER/.forward and change the email address to the new one.

I get the error "not a plain file" when I try to transfer files with FTP.

The error "not a plain file" usually indicates that FTP cannot transfer a file because it is larger than 2 Gbytes in size. First, if you are transferring files from one of NCSA's HPC systems, use mssftp or msscmd instead of ftp. (See the man pages for details.) If you are not on one of NCSA's HPC systems, you may be able to use one the following commands at the FTP prompt:

   get remotebigfile "|cat > localbigfile"
   put "|cat < localbigfile" remotebigfile

where remotebigfile is the name of the file on the remote computer and localbigfile is the name of the file on the local computer.

If the local system's cat command supports large files, this should work fine.