The purpose of this page is to describe the steps students enrolled in CPS111, CPS112, or CPS211 must take before using one of the computers in the Macintosh lab (M110) for lab work. The steps outlined here are the same, regardless of which software tools one actually uses for software development.

To follow these steps, you will need two things:

1. An account on the department file server. Each student enrolled in the class will have an individual account and an individual password on the server. (Click here for directions for changing your server password). All of your files will be stored on the server, which means you can access them from anywhere on campus - not just the specific computer you used to create them.
2. The password for your class's login to the computer you are using in lab. This will allow you to access the course software on the lab machines. However, nothing that you create will actually remain on the computer you use - everything should be created and stored on the server. (In fact, whenever the computer is rebooted, anything you have stored on it will automatically be deleted!)

A server account will be set up for you, and the passwords for your server account and the class login, will be furnished to you if you are enrolled in any course requiring Java software development in our Macintosh Lab. Note that your server password is an individual password - unique to you, and usable from anywhere on campus where you can access the server. The class login password applies to the entire class, and is for the computers in the lab only, though it will work on any of them.

Before you can access the tools described here, you need to log on to the Macintosh. Specific logins have been developed for each course. Your professor will furnish you with the password for your course.

To log on to the Macintosh, you need to be seeing a login screen listing the various logons. (Unfortunately, it is not possible to include a screen shot of this screen, because the screen capture program only becomes accessible after a login!) The login screen displays a single window containing the phrase "Mac OS X" and icons plus names for the various logins available on the computer. (If you are not looking at a login screen, then the previous user of the computer didn't log out, so you must first log out - see the discussion of how to do this below.)

To login, click the name of your course. This will bring up a new box with a space for you to type the password for the course (which the professor gave you.) Type the password in the box - note that it will echo as bullet ( • ) characters. Also, note the the password is case sensitive - be sure cap locks are not on!

Once you have logged in, you need to connect to the server.

1. Be sure the Finder is the currently-running program. (The name Finder will appear as the program name at the very left of the menu bar at the top of the screen.) If not, click anywhere on the desktop (outside of the window for any application) and the Finder will be made current. (When the Finder is the current application, the word "Finder" will appear at the left end of the menu bar.)

2. Choose the "Connect to Server..." option at the bottom of the Finder's Go menu.

   
   
   
   

3. A Connect to Server dialog box should appear, which will look like the following:

   
   
   
   

4. Type the samba protocol specifier (smb://) and the name of the CS department server
   

   smb://moses.cs.gordon.edu

   In the Server Address box, then click "Connect". (It may already appear there, if the last server accessed on this machine was the CS server - in which case you can simply click "Connect", or it may appear in the list of favorite servers, in which case you can double-click it.)
   
   
5. In any case, you will now see a dialog like the following:

   
   
   
   

6. Click "Authenticate". You will now see a dialog like the following.

   
   
   
   

7. Enter your personal username (your email name), and your Samba password (which will echo as all bullets), then click "OK". You will now see a dialog just like the "Mount" dialog you saw earlier - but now you have been Authenticated and can choose a volume to mount. (Before you authenticated, your volume would not appear in the list, and you would be asked to authenticate anyway if you tried to mount one of the volumes shown). Note that in the "Select a share" dropdown in this this dialog box, you may choose:
   • Your own server volume (same as your server account name)
     or
     
   • The common volume, which contains files being made available to the class as a whole. Its name is your course ID. (You may also see volumes for other courses, which you don't need to access.)

   To select a single volume, select it in the drop down, and click "OK". If you need to select more than one volume (e.g. if the lab directions call for mounting both your own volume and the common volume) then you will have to go through the whole process twice - once for each volume. There does not seem to be any way to select to mount two shares at once.

8. An icon for the volume you have selected should appear on your desktop (possibly after a brief delay.) When you want to open a window for a server volume, you can double click on the icon for that volume.

   
   
   
   

VERY IMPORTANT: When you are through with your session in lab, you should logout from the computer. To to this, select Log Out (the last item) from the "Apple" menu at the upper left hand corner of the screen. You will see a confirmation box, asking you if you are sure you want to log out now. Click the Log Out button and you're done! (The volumes you mounted are dismounted when you log out.) Note that if you fail to log out, and leave your Volume on the desktop, someone else can do nasty things to you!