Mac Support
Here are some useful links, tips, and tricks for using Mac OS X machines to access the department's resources.
Terminal Access
As you know, the mathematics department systems only allow SSH connections, which means that you will need an SSH client to open a terminal session on one of the department's machines.
Mac OS X includes SSH (both as a service and as a client). All you
need to do to connect to the department's machines is to open a
Terminal window (Terminal.app is located in the Utilities folder,
which is, in turn, inside the Applications folder), and run ssh your_username@host.math.hmc.edu.
X-Window System
It is possible to display X Window windows from a remote Linux server on a Mac over SSH. To do so, you will first need to install the X11 application from Apple (it's typically included in the Optional Installs package, under Applications; it can also be downloaded from Apple).
For Tiger, you will have to start the X11 application by finding
its icon in Applications/Utilities and double-clicking on it.
Leopard has a mechanism that launches X11 automatically when needed
(you need to make sure that you are not setting
a DISPLAY environment variable in your shell startup
files to use this trick).
Once X11 is running, type
ssh -Y you@remotehost
to open a connection to a remote server. You should be able to launch applications that use X and have their windows appear on your machine.
File Transfer
Mac OS X's file-transfer utilities are limited to command-line
versions (scp and sftp), which aren't that
easy or fun to use.
Fugu is free (as in beer and speech) program from
the University of Michigan's Research Systems Unix
Group that gives you a user-friendly graphical interface for
transferring files via scp or sftp, and also
includes support for setting up SSH tunnels.
Fugu can be downloaded from the official site.
Samba
The department is currently running Samba, a file server that uses the CIFS or SMB protocol to share filesystems and printers.
If you need access to the department's Samba server, please contact the department's systems administrator for more details.
