Remote login to CDF

If you have internet access at home, you can log in to your CDF account and work from home. Unfortunately, I probably can't give you any assistance with this other than the following advice, although you're welcome to ask (if you're a student in one of my courses -- I can't undertake to answer such questions from everyone who might happen upon this web page).

There is a remote login protocol called "ssh" which is supported by the CDF computers. That is, the CDF computers run the "server"; what you need for home is the "client" software, which is the other side of a "server-client" connection over the internet. (Similarly, your web browser is a "client" and it connects to a "web server" over the internet.)

Possible client software (all freely distributable) is:

For unix/linux, OpenSSH. Probably included with your modern OS distribution; try typing "ssh user@cdf.utoronto.ca".
For Mac OS X, also openssh. Use a terminal window (in Utilities under Applications).
For MS-Windows, PuTTY.

You should try to run applications such as web browsers on the machine you are physically at; e.g. start firefox before doing a network login to a(nother) CDF host (or make sure that when you start it later, you are running it on the local machine, not on the remote machine).

I strongly recommend doing your work on the CDF computers. Using ssh, you can do this from home.

On the other hand, you may be able to work on your programs using a C compiler at home. Some of the issues here are:

If your own computer ceases functioning for any reason, this won't be accepted as a legitimate excuse for lateness. The CDF machines are provided for you to do your course work on and they are properly maintained, by professional sysadmins.
I will likely not be able to help you with any technical problems with your own equipment (although again, my students are welcome to ask for help and I'll see if I have any relevant advice).
To test and submit your programs, they have to be in your directory on the CDF computers. So you will have to transfer them, and some people introduce problems with their files when they do this. In particular, you will likely have to make sure that they are transferred in "text mode" so as to avoid interesting control characters cropping up at the ends of the lines. Other problems people experience relate to non-standard character codes used by macintoshes and especially ms-windows, notably for the directional quotes and em-dash.
Your programs have to compile and run on the CDF computers. If you are using a C compiler at home, well, C compilers vary substantially in quality and in the extent to which they correctly implement the C programming language. Furthermore, a lot of C compilers these days allow "C++isms" of various kinds, especially if those compilers are just restricted versions of commercial C++ compilers from the same vendor, and you must write your assignments for this course in C, not C++. So it will be essential to make sure your programs function correctly on the CDF computers, after you transfer them from home.
Some of the programs in CSC 209 will be unix-specific, and won't work on a non-unix (and non-linux) system which you may have at home. (This is not a problem if you are running linux or unix at home.)

To copy files to and from cdf unix/linux, I recommend:

for unix/linux, openssh (or any other version of ssh) has "scp" and "sftp". I use scp, and also often "rsync -e ssh".
for MS-Windows, PuTTY comes with "pscp" from the same site. For a graphical-user-interface scp client, try "WinSCP".
For Mac OS X, a nice GUI-clicky sftp client is "Fugu".

[main course page]