UNB/ CS/ David Bremner/ teaching/ cs2613/ Frequently Asked Questions

All the examples are for Linux, as that's the official computing environment for the course. Most things should also work in Mac / Windows, with appropriate adjustments.

Running the VM on your own computer

fcshome
As you will quickly figure out, the fcshome link does not work for the downloadable appliance. See fcs-vm-cs2613-dev for more discussion about how to store your files and access coursegit in this case.
help I can't download the VM
I've tested the download with Firefox 80 and Chromium 83, on Linux.
  • Make sure you are using your FCS Password.
  • Try a different browser, ideally one of the ones I mentioned above.
  • If all else fails, contact the System Support Division. Note that they are extremely busy at certain times in the term.

Remote access

There is nothing specific to CS2613 about remote lab access, we are using the FCS standard setup for Fall 2020. Review the FCS SSH Instructions and FCS VNC Instructions

SSH is hanging
Make sure you are connected to the [UNB VPN]
SSH: Permission denied
  • Make sure you are using your FCS Password
  • Make sure your local user name matches the FCS user id. If not, you may have to use ssh username@machine.cs.unb.ca with username and machine replaced appropriately.

Backups

Nobody likes to lose work, and learning to recover from system failures is part of the goals of this course.

using git for backups
If you are sufficiently dilligent with pushing to the class git server (and committing all of your relevant files), then this could work. See the question below about making sure your push succeed.
using tar for backups

You can make a backup file of your cs2613 directory / repo as follows.

$ tar zcvf cs2613.tar.gz cs2613

Now upload / copy that file to somewhere safe, preferably on a different computer.

You will see a bunch of output like

cs2613/
cs2613/frog-project/
cs2613/frog-project/sitemap.txt
cs2613/frog-project/css/
cs2613/frog-project/css/pygments.css
cs2613/frog-project/css/custom.css
cs2613/frog-project/css/scribble.css
cs2613/frog-project/css/bootstrap.min.css
cs2613/frog-project/css/bootstrap.min.css.map
cs2613/frog-project/js/
cs2613/frog-project/js/jquery-3.2.1.slim.min.js
cs2613/frog-project/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js
cs2613/frog-project/About.html
cs2613/frog-project/.frog/
⋮

. You can extract your backup file with

  $ tar zxvf cs2613.tar.gz

Note that this will overwrite the cs2613 directory wherever you are on the file system.

Working with git

How do I know if my push was successful

Make sure you are connected to the UNB VPN. You can do this either in course VM, or on your own computer with git installed.

Go to a different directory and clone the repo. E.g.

$ cd
$ mkdir trash
$ cd trash
$ git clone  https://<user>@vcs.cs.unb.ca/git/cs2613-<user>

You can either inspect manually, or better run "raco frog -bp". If that complains something about "prefix", then you probably still have generated files commited to your repo. You can run "raco frog --clean" to remove them, and then retry "raco frog -bp".