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Frequently asked questions

Please note, that answers marked with TODO need to be checked, whether they still apply.

How can I read/write data from my usb drive?

Use a file manager that is aware of pluggable devices such as Dolphin to access your thumbdrive . After first accessing such a device this way, it also will become available to any other means such as the terminal.

Can I have this software package installed?

Generally it is dicouraged that software is installed on a single PC. However, we may install packages from the official Debian repository if asked, but there is no guarantee and no support from our side in any case.

Please consider to install your software locally (to your home directory).

I have an exotic latex style, can you install it global?

No, most likely you are the only one that uses this style. Just put the ".sty" and ".cls" files in the same directory as your ".tex" file. If you intend to use your style very often it might be easier to create your own texmf-local tree, see the teTex documentation.

The tools du and qutoas give different results. What is correct?

Both results are correct. The command du -s /home/username counts the logical size of a file while quotas counts the physical size of a file. Due to the fact that the file size must be a multible of 4096 bytes there might be an overhead if a large number of small files exists.

I deleted a file, can I recover it?

Not at all. That is not strictly true, but that is the premise you should be working with. We have daily backups to tape-drives of /home/.... However, there is NO guarantee that those actually are running and we will be able to restore your data. YOU are responsible for all your data.

Also the recovery of files from a backup is a very time consuming procedure (for the admins). Therefore, we only consider recovering very important files!

If you think your lost file belongs to this category send an email to the helpdesk, specifing the exact name of the file/directory (including the full path). Furthermore, specify the exact date for the file you would like to recover, e.g. if you delete a file on monday, you can get the sunday, saturday, friday, … snapshot.

I receive lot of spam mail. How can I get rid of it?

We run spamassasin on our mail-server. However, we do not delete any email, but rather mark the message in the subject (as well as in the message source). You may configure your own rules in your email client.

TODO I don't get any mails from outside the ITP, why can this happen?

Did you lately modify your forward file .forward? Then you might have introduced some bad formating for the spamassasin tool. Try to recreate the correct forward file with "spamconfig". Better get rid of the .forward file entirely.

I got an email telling I am "in violation with the quotasystem" but there are only very few files in my home directory.

In Linux there exist so called "hidden" files/directories that are not displayed by a simple ls but rather with ls -a. These files/directories start with a dot, e.g. ".bashrc". In order to get an overview of the files/directories (including hidden ones) and their diskspace consumption in megabyte the following command may help:

du -ms * | sort -n

Using pine/alpine I get the message 'Terminal type "xterm-debian", is unknown.'. How can I get rid of this message and make pine work?

Add the following line in .bashrc_private:

alias pine='TERM=vt100 pine'

Created: 2020-07-14 Tue 16:03

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