All PhD students automatically receive accounts on the department Sun workstations. Undergraduates and graduate students can obtain accounts on Owlnet, the Rice University network. Your Owlnet account should be used for all course work. Accounts on other research machines such as the Intel iPSC/860, Thinking Machines CM-2, MasPar MP-1, and others are usually granted upon request. If you encounter computer problems, send mail to help@cs.rice.edu and Vicky Dean and her staff will assist you.
A great deal of important information is distributed electronically.
You should keep up with the newsgroup rice.comp.general.
This is where information about the CS computer system and other departmental
information is posted.
(The ``msgs'' Unix program can also be used to read these messages.)
There are several other newsgroups used to convey information including
rice.owlnews.general, and rice.general.
Many classes in the department also have their own newsgroup.
There are a number of important mail aliases which can be used to send mail to specific groups of people in the department. Some of the more commonly used aliases are:
| phd | reaches all PhD students |
| mcs | reaches all MCS students |
| cs-grad | reaches all computer science graduate students |
| faculty | reaches all faculty and post-docs, some staff |
| staff | reaches staff people (support, technical writers, etc) |
| stc | reaches all STC researchers and staff |
In addition, there are numerous mailing lists specific to the various research groups around the department (ex: compiler, systems, etc). You should make sure your name is included in all of the appropriate mailing lists. The mailing list distribution files are kept in the directory
/home/maillist/lists
For a description of all the various mailing lists, see the file ``lists'' in the directory above.