SDL Resources

Student VMs

The campus has a blade server for SDL projects. Details:

• The host names are sdlstudentvmXX.msoe.edu where XX is a one or two-digit number.
• Your login is a bit non-standard for Unix hosts: if your email name is xyz, then the login is 'xyz@ad.msoe.edu'.
• Remember that when you log in to a Unix host, it does not echo passwords (including not displaying dots as you press keys).
• You can use any SSH client to log in; PuTTY is a good choice. Ask questions on Teams if you're having problems with this. A common issue is that the light grey is hard to read. In PuTTY, you can create a session for your server and set the Window Colours so the Default Foreground is (say) 255/255/0 (bright yellow).

  Note: the first time you log in to a machine using SSH (such as with PuTTY), the system prompts you with a fingerprint id of the target machine. This is to prevent host spoofing. Just accept the fingerprint; the real check is that if it changes on future logins (from the same laptop), that could indicate someone is doing something suspicious.

• You must be behind the campus firewall to access the servers. In particular, off-campus clients will not be able to access them.
• All students with logins on a particular system should have sudo access. Let us know if you don't so we can get it corrected.
• Make sure gcc is installed. If it is not, do

          sudo apt install gcc
  

  This will make sure you can install other software. Let you instructor know if gcc is not installed and doing the apt command fails.
• What can I do on these systems? There are few limits. Clearly do not do things that would break campus security (such as deploy a webpage bypassing the campus firewall), but if the system becomes unusable then IT can simply reset it back to the initial state. You can certainly uninstall and reinstall packages, update the system, delete logs, etc. Feel free to ask your instructor if you are unsure about how to administer the system.
• Accessing your repository on the vm: see the Git Notes for SWE 2410 for setting up a key. Where it says to open a "git bash" prompt, you can just log in to the student VM. To use a key, type

          eval `ssh-agent`
          ssh-add
  

  You will need to do these two steps each time you log in. (You can probably modify your .bashrc file to do this; search online if setting up access each time is an issue.)
• The basic git commands you will need:

          git clone path-to-repository
                  (copies repository to folder under current folder)
          cd repository-name
                  (change working directory into the repository)
          git checkout branch-name
                  (change to working on named branch)
          git pull
                  (pull any changes from remote)
          git add filename_or_path
                  (mark a file to be added on next commit)
          git commit -am "message" filename_or_path
                  (commit changes to local copy of repository; -a adds all new and changed files to the commit)
          git push
                  (push changes to remote repository)