CSE 481D: Capstone Software Design - Spring 2008

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Course Lab Location

We have (exclusive) use of Sieg 324. This is an incredibly great situation:

• It's above ground.
• It's all ours (so occasional noise is no problem).
• It's a single place, so will encourage you to work in physical proximity to each other. (It turns out that is really important -- it's surprisingly hard to make progress if working in separate locations, even using technology like IM. This is especially true at the beginning, end, and middle of the course.)
• It's right down the hall from the animation class lab and classroom (and the entire animation scene is way cool).

Entry is by card key. If you have problems getting in, let me know.

Course Lab Systems

We have about a dozen quad-core machines, donated by Intel, supplemented by a few dual-core machines. We need to decide (soon!) what OS to run. That decision is tangled up in the decisions of what development technologies to use, which itself is tangled up in game design decisions.

The entire lab is firewalled, which is a pre-requisite to our having root access to the machines, which is prerequisite to getting anything done in reasonable time that involves installing new packages. A side effect of this (having root access) is that no filesystems are exported to the lab machines -- you won't find the usual paths, like /cse/courses/.... You'll have to access remote machines using ssh and the like, in the rare instance that access is required.

To acquire root privilege, say sudo, or maybe sudo bash. To release root privilege type ctrl-d.

Software / Policies

The CSE 481 lab is run differently than all other labs. The Windows boxes are never re-imaged, so you can install things and they stay installed. (It also means if a machine is corrupted it stays corrupted until someone tells support about it -- tell support about it.) You can acquire root on the Linux boxes using sudo.

Note: The local drives on the lab machines are never backed up.