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Course Environment

Aim Instructions for users of the Course Environment

Prerequisite

  • Either a Nikhef account or a student account you get at your enrollment for a specific course.

Instructions

Login:

The classroom thinclients start up with a login screen where you can simply enter the account credentials you have received from the instructor. In case you are an instructor yourself or a Nikhef user who is participating, you can use your own login credentials.

In case you want to use a laptop or other computer at a remote location, you can access the Classroom Computing Environment through a browser. Once you are connected, enter the following address into your browser:

https://les-center.nikhef.nl

This will bring you to the same login screen which the classroom Thinclients are also using.

The user password can be changed via the password form at https://sso.nikhef.nl/passwd.

Work Environment:

The Classroom Computing Environment is a so-called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure which simulates a Linux desktop machine on your Thinclient or within your browser. Depending on course requirements, you will be working on a specific Linux distribution (CentOS, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu etc.) with all necessary software for the course installed. Please note that due to the nature of the setup, graphics rendering will not perform as well as on an actual desktop or laptop computer.

From within the environment, access to addresses outside its own network is restricted to HTTP and HTTPS.

Home Directories and Shares:

Each user has a home directory in /user which is only accessible to them.

While you are connected to the Classroom Computing Environment an additional shared folder is available at /data. This share can be used to store and retrieve course materials and other files as necessary.

This folder can also be accessed from within the nikhef Linux network or the login servers (login.nikhef.nl and login2.nikhef.nl). To do so, simply execute cd /data/course and the folder will be mounted to your filesystem (might take a few seconds).

Access to the sub-folders of that share depends on membership in the respective course group(s).