The Microsoft Teams service in the University is changing rapidly, and is also subject to technical problems due to sudden increases in usage of the service. Please see the University Teams Status page before contacting us for help and advice.

Getting started

Any member of the University with a Raven account can log in to the web interface at https://teams.microsoft.com/. There are also clients available for Windows PCs, Macs, iOS and Android. Where a dedicated desktop client is not available (e.g. Linux), Microsoft's recommendation is to instead use the web inteface.

The web interface may be the quickest way in to experiment with Teams and get familiar with it. Once you and your colleagues are using it regularly, you may prefer to use an app so that you don't miss important notifications when you don't have the web interface open.

Team structure

Currently, there is one Team per institution, so the Department of Chemistry has a team prefixed CHEM. You can belong to multiple teams, and people across the University can communicate with each other using "Chats" even if they don't share a Team.

New teams can be requested from UIS if necessary (e.g. for long-term inter-departmental collaborations) but these may take a while to be activated. In the meantime, and for all other use cases, we recommend the use of chats for now.

Channels and chats

Within each Team, there is the concept of channels. Channels can either be public to the entire Team or (though not currently made available by UIS) restricted to certain members thereof. Each team has a "General" channel that everyone is automatically subscribed to. Teams are limited in the number of channels they can contain, and (for now) can only be created by the Computer Officers, so at the moment we are happy to create a channel for each PI on request to support@ch.cam.ac.uk. Note however that channels are currently readable (and by default writable) to everyone in Chemistry.

Chats are much more ad-hoc than channels, instant to setup with no restrictions on numbers, and conversations within them are private to their participants. Members of chats can add other participants and leave if they wish to. Chat history is also saved.

To start a new chat, click the "New chat" icon adjacent to the "Microsoft Teams" heading in the sidebar, which should be visible no matter which app within Teams you are currently viewing. You can then select the participants by typing their names or CRSIDs. Sometimes this doesn't work reliably, so if not, just go back into it and try again. It should be able to find people from across the University.

Calls can be arranged between the participants of chats, with each member choosing whether to participate with video or just voice. Screen sharing is also supported if using certain clients. Presentations can also be hosted, and other participants can browse through the slides without affecting the speaker's view.

Documents can also be edited simultaneously by members of a chat, without having to worry about which version is the latest etc.

Data restrictions

Microsoft Teams is OK for University data at levels 0, 1, and 2, provided always that the members of the relevant Team understand and accept how Teams are managed in terms of members, guests, owners etc. The UIS documentation has more details on where data are stored and what is permitted.

More information

See the documentation from UIS

• Microsoft Teams: see the dedicated section above.
• Zulip: open-source chat platform, hosted by the Department of Physics. Any member of the University with a Raven account can log in to https://chat.phy.cam.ac.uk
• Slack www.slack.com

• Members of the University have access to Microsoft Teams. See the dedicated section above.
• Google G-suite: members of the University have access to core G Suite apps, which includes online access to Google Docs for collaborative document editing

• See https://www.libraries.cam.ac.uk/eresources/access-full-text-anywhere
• The majority of journals will allow you to authenticate via Shibboleth regardless of the network you are connected to.
• If you connect to the Department VPN service using a full tunnel configuration you will be able to access the same online journals etc that you would have access to from within the Department. The default configuration is not full tunnel; if you're having difficulty download a full tunnel configuration file from https://downloads.ch.cam.ac.uk/vpn/latest .

Connect using our VPN service and then follow the normal instructions for connecting to a Department fileserver.

Connect to the Department network using our VPN service (or you may wish to use ssh via the bastion host).

• Windows computers: many managed Department Windows computers should be accessible via Remote Desktop. If you think Remote Desktop access has not been permitted for computers in your group, please email support@ch.cam.ac.uk
  • If you are using a Windows computer remotely, you should already have Remote Desktop Connection as an option in the Start menu. If you are using a Linux computer remotely, the choice of remote desktop client will depend on the distribution you use but remmina is commonly available.
• Linux computers: once connected to the Department network (see above) you can ssh to your managed Department Linux workstation.

You will need to know the full name of the computer you wish to connect to. This will be of the form computername.ch.cam.ac.uk or computername.ch.private.cam.ac.uk. If you're unsure what the name of your computer is, you can visit https://myip.ch.cam.ac.uk from the computer to find out before leaving the Department. If you cannot do this because you are already away from the Department, please email support@ch.cam.ac.uk for advice

See this webpage on how to check if your Windows or Mac laptop is encrypted and how to enable disk encryption: https://help.uis.cam.ac.uk/service/security/cyber-security-awareness/wfh-security/laptop-encryption-check

All the machines use your Admitto credentials for authentication. Some machines are locked down so only members of certain research groups can access them. If this is the case you will get an error message saying 'only members of group whatever may log in' if you are not in the appropriate group.

You can change your Admitto password from a web browser at https://apps.ch.cam.ac.uk/ssms/changepassword.

The workstation should be set up to print to the nearest black and white printer. To print from the command line use the lpr command, but be careful as you cannot print all file types from the command line. Postscript, PDF, and plain text are fine. For other file types open them in the program you used to create them and select File>Print.

If you want to print to a different printer then you can use lpr -P printername. See this question for more help on printing.

Exchange Online

There are two options: Evolution and webmail. Evolution is preconfigured to use Exchange Online (ExOL) and can be started by typing 'evolution' on the command line, or via the application finder. To use ExOL webmail, go to https://outlook.office.com/. Evolution can be reconfigured to include additional mail accounts using IMAP or EWS.

Point your web browser at http://localhost:631/ to edit the printer settings on your machine or add new queues.

Go to the Dash icon on the launcher bar. This is the icon in the top left corner of the screen on Ubuntu 16.04 and the bottom left on Ubuntu 18.04. Click on it and a search box will appear. Type 'settings' in this box to show the available applications for changing settings. The two to start with are 'System Settings' and 'Compiz Configuration'.

Ubuntu is the default desktop on the Ubuntu 20.04 image. GNOME is the default desktop on the Ubuntu 18.04 image. Both have been configured so that a terminal and web browser are readily available. Both operating systems of machine have some other desktop sessions available, including KDE and FVWM, but the non-default options are not supported by the computer office. This means you're welcome to use them but we can't help fix them if you encounter problems. If you wish you may install your own window manager and use a .xsession file to launch it.

Really large compute jobs should be run on one of the compute servers. However smaller ones can be run on the workstations. If you do run compute jobs on workstations you may wish to start them inside a terminal multiplexer like screen or tmux, so that if you get logged out the job will continue to run. For large managed workstations which are shared between a number of people we can also install the SLURM workload manager to manage compute jobs.

The viewers installed on the system are Foxit and evince (aka Document Viewer). You can print PDFs by going to File>Print within evince, or using the command line pdf2ps command to turn the PDF file into Postscript (which is the language printers speak).

If a PDF will not print one way, try another method or a different model of printer. Some PDFs are buggy. Some printers are buggy. Consequently some combinations just do not work.

Some PDFs will not print in duplex on the duplex queues no matter what you do. If you capture and examine the Postscript being sent to the printer, you will see that it contains commands to turn off duplexing. This comes from the original PDF document and there's not a lot we can do about it. If it bothers you, you can pdf2ps the document and edit the Postscript before printing to save a bit of paper.

Plug it in and wait a few seconds. The Nautilus file manager will show an icon for the disk if you look in it, but you can also see it under /media/$USER/disk or /media/$USER/usbdisk or similar. To safely remove it you either right-click on the Nautilus icon and select "Umount volume".

If you have put a Unix filesystem on your disk Linux will mount it in read-write mode but you may still find you can't read or write your files. This is because the Unix user accounts on the disk do not match up with those on your workstation. In this case you will need to make the files world-writable on the machine where you first put the Unix filesystem on the disk.

See the section on ssh access in this document.

Some of the workstations are backed up. Others are not. It depends on whether the sector/group that owns the workstation made arrangements for backups. At the moment the Theory and CMI workstations are definitely supposed to be backed up. For workstations in those groups, we backup data in /home, but anything under /scratch is not backed up. We usually aim to:

• have a few backups taken over the last 24 hours
• then, about one backup per day for the previous week
• then, about one backup per week for the previous month
• then, about one backup per month for the previous few months

but this is reliant on a number of factors, such as: how rapidly your data changes, your computer being switched on when a backup is scheduled to run, whether you have a large number of small files (which take longer to backup than one large file), as well as other factors. Thus, we cannot guarantee to have all of the backups listed above for a particular workstation.

For managed Linux workstations in other parts of the Department, check with your group computer rep or the Computer Officers. Another good way to check is to look at the system monitor records for your machine. These can be found at http://hobbit.ch.cam.ac.uk/hobbit/ (Raven-protected). If you click on the 'administration' menu on that website you can search for your machine.

If you need something restored from a backup please send email to support@ch.cam.ac.uk . On some of the machines read-only copies of the backups may also be available as an NFS mount under /rsnapshots on the machine itself, but not all of the backup servers can provide this functionality. Also, you may be able to run the snapshot-explorer command to browse the available backups of your computer.

If /home is small then it is probably because your workstation is one of those that is backed up by the sector it belongs to. Providing two weeks worth of nightly backups for a large collection of workstations takes a lot of disk space. All the machines have an unbacked up /scratch filesystem in which you have much more space and you can put large temporary files, your (legal) music collection, and so on. Please note that not all the workstations are backed up! Check with the Computer Officers or your group computer rep if you are not sure, or look at the Hobbit system monitor which records backup status.

The 'registered user' of the machine should find they have rights to run the package manager to install packaged software. Here's an example:

$ apt-cache search frozen-bubble     # search for a package
p   frozen-bubble                    - Pop out the bubbles!                      
p   frozen-bubble-data               - Data files for Frozen-Bubble 
$ sudo apt-get install frozen-bubble # install it

Most non-packaged software can be installed in your home directory by using appropriate configuration options. The UIS run an excellent course on how to build software on Unix with a lot of emphasis on installing in /home, the notes for which can be found here.

If you think a package is likely to be useful to several people in the sector please mention it to the Computer Officers. If we have time we may install it on the image so everyone can use it. Mentioning the URL for the package is helpful.

If the Linux distribution that the standard image is based on contains a pre-packaged version of the software you want then just ask the Computer Officers to install the package for you. However the package has to come from the exact version of the distribution that we are using. We will also not install 3rd party RPMs or debs for this reason. If you aren't sure, by all means ask the Computer Officers.

Much software is already available on the image. There is a complete list here.

The Python environment that comes with Ubuntu is usually out of date because we use the long term support Ubuntu releases which are only refreshed every two years. Hence we also install the Anaconda Python distribution to give access to an up to date copy of Python with thousands of data science modules available. Anaconda also allows you to set up personal customized Python environments containing the exact combination of module versions you need. To use Anaconda, load the anaconda environment module with

 module add anaconda/python3

More information about Anaconda is available at https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/computing/anaconda-conda and https://www.anaconda.com/

On 18.04 and up, rclone from https://rclone.org/ is available. This provides easy methods to access Google Drive and Dropbox storage.

Check the modules system as you probably need to load a module. Shorter version: type 'module avail' to see the options, and then 'module load whatever' to load the one you want.

Long explanation: The workstations have lots of different software packages installed. Some are only available to research groups who have paid for licences; others are available to all. Some come in multiple versions and different groups like to use different versions. There are so many options that we use the modules system to manage a lot of the application software; a default set of modules is usually loaded on a new user account but no default set can please everyone. If you don't seem to have the package you want (or any copy of your package at all) in your environment, read the modules documentation to see how to list and load the available software packages.

LibreOffice will open many of the Microsoft Office document formats.

The root password is kept by the Computer Officers. We do not give out root passwords to managed workstations because they rapidly become unmanageable when someone else can change their configuration without telling us.

Having said that, on the Ubuntu image the 'registered user' of the machine should have sudo rights to run the package manager. This depends on the machine being configured with the right 'registered user' in our database, so if you think you should have sudo rights but it's not working, just let support@ch.cam.ac.uk know. Here's how to use the package manager:

$ aptitude search frozen-bubble # search for a package
p   frozen-bubble                   - Pop out the bubbles!                      
p   frozen-bubble-data              - Data files for Frozen-Bubble 
$ sudo aptitude install frozen-bubble # install it

There are many ways of accomplishing this. If you're not using the latest image version you can get a much newer version of texlive by asking the IT staff to upgrade your machine. Another way, if you just want a few packages is to add them to your local texmf tree.

CTAN has a number of up to date packages. Simply download and extract one of them in a temporary directory, run latex on the .ins file, then copy the files to your local texmf directory (e.g /home/spqr/texmf/tex/latex/chemcompounds/chemcompounds.sty). You can then verify which file will be used by running kpsewhich (e.g "kpsewhich chemcompounds.sty" would give "/home/spqr/texmf/tex/latex/chemcompounds/chemcompounds.sty").

Everyone using computer facilities in Chemistry or SPRI needs to have an entry in the Admin Database. For Chemistry people, please fill in the online registration form. You should have been given a link to that when you arrived. For SPRI people arrangements are made automatically. Until your data has been entered onto the database you cannot connect computers to the network or get computer accounts.

Most people will want two passwords: an Admitto password (for accessing things belonging to the Department of Chemistry and SPRI), and a Raven password for accessing Exchange Online (Cambridge email) and Raven (web resources, for example journals). 

• Please ask your group's secretary or Principal Investigator to email support@ch.cam.ac.uk to request your Raven account. They should include the following information. 
  If you're unsure who should make a request for you, please email support@ch.cam.ac.uk and we will point you in the right direction. New postgraduate students don't need to apply, as their UIS accounts are set up in advance.
  • Full name
  • Academic title
  • Gender
  • Date of birth
  • Start date
  • End date
  • Status (either staff or visitor)
  • Whether you have previously been registered in the University of Cambridge and if so
    • Any other names you may have previously used in the University of Cambridge
    • Your CRSID if known
• Admitto accounts are set up automatically once you are registered (see above) ie the Admin Database knows about you and has your CRSID recorded. If you cannot wait for the normal registration process, please email support@ch.cam.ac.uk and explain the situation, or have a colleague do that for you.

To collect your Raven password email us at support@ch.cam.ac.uk. We will schedule a meeting to give you access to your accounts.

To collect your Admitto password either visit one of the computer offices in Chemistry with photo id, or if you have a UIS or Raven password collect it online at https://apps.ch.cam.ac.uk/ssms/collectpassword

Before you can collect your Admitto password you must agree to follow the Department's Software Policy.

To change your Raven password go to https://password.raven.cam.ac.uk/

To change your Admitto password go to https://apps.ch.cam.ac.uk/ssms/changepassword

How to choose an Admitto password that the system will accept

You can connect your laptop/mobile device to the department network by using our ChemNet Wifi service.

To find information about connecting other devices to the department network, please see https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/computing/obtaining-network-connection

The quickest way to get started is to use the web interface.

• Exchange Online users: https://www.office.com

If you want to use a more powerful email program please see our email pages.

Please see https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/computing/obtaining-software

Please see https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/computing/printing

The best way to contact us is to email support@ch.cam.ac.uk . You can find other ways to contact us at https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/computing/contact-computer-officers