ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au

About Ariel

Ariel is the name of a mischievous sprite in The Tempest by William Shakespeare. It is also: the 12th closest satellite of the planet Uranus; a variety of Arabian gazelle; a squirrel-like Australian marsupial; a Brazillian toucan; and a biblical name meaning "the lion of God".

The machine ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au provides general interactive unix logins for University staff and affiliates.

Migration to Linux

On the 2nd of December, 2013, ariel was migrated from the Solaris operating system to Linux.

You will now need to log in to ariel using your central University password.

Things that haven't changed:

All of your user files and email have been migrated to the new system.
Your email address username@ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au still works.
Ordinary email forwarding via $HOME/.forward still works.
Your personal web pages under http://ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au/~username/ still work, except if they require PHP which is no longer supported.

Things that have changed:

Your email INBOX is no longer $HOME/.mail but /var/spool/mail/username.
Email is no longer delivered by procmail. If you are using your $HOME/.procmailrc to do automatic email filtering you will need to add the necessary magic to your $HOME/.forward. See below.
Support for fetching email over the network via the POP3 protocol is no longer supported, only via the IMAP protocol. The system logs show that none of us were using POP3 anyway.
PHP scripts are no longer supported by the web server.
Remote file upload and download via FTP is no longer supported. To upload and download files you will need to use SFTP, with a client such as WinSCP or Filezilla.
Any software you have compiled yourself under your home directory will not work on the new platform. You will need to recompile and reinstall it.

Procmail

If you want your mail filtered through procmail, create a $HOME/.forward file with the following contents (verbatim, including all the single and double quote marks):

"|IFS=' ' && exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75"

Personal Home Pages on Ariel

Users with ariel accounts are able to host personal home pages on the system.

To enable this you must make a sub-directory of your home directory named public_html.

$ mkdir $HOME/public_html

Files placed inside this directory are then accessible via a URL like:

http://ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au/~username/filename.html

You will need to make sure your file permissions are set to allow everyone read access, and your directory permissions are set to allow everyone execute access.

$ chmod o+x $HOME $HOME/public_html
$ chmod o+r $HOME $HOME/public_html/*

A file named index.html is searched for in a directory and served up for URLs ending in a slash.