"HOW-TO" Perform Common Tasks

Login to Sandcastle

Sandcastle is our main departmental Linux server. It can be accessed through SSH (tcp port 22) with any SSH capable client. You can find information regarding free clients and some configuration settings on our software page. The fully qualified domain name of Sandcastle is sandcastle.cosc.BrockU.CA and it's IP address is 139.57.100.6. This will provide you will shell access to your account and can also be used for SFTP transfers.

Transfer files to/from Sandcastle

To transfer files to and from Sandcastle (outside of our lab computers) you will need a FTP program capable of SFTP connections. We have a couple suggested in the Help Centre section under "Configure File Transfers". For more information on encrypted FTP please see our security page. When transferring text files between Windows clients and Sandcastle please be aware that the text file format is different on Windows computers than it is on Linux computers. This will often cause issues with web pages and source code files that are being uploaded to compile on Sandcastle. There are 2 ways to deal with this issue, the first is to set up your FTP client to convert the files as they are transferred. The second is to convert the text files after they have been uploaded to Sandcastle using the command 'dos2unix filename'.

Set up a web page in my home directory

In order to set up a personal web page on Sandcastle there are a few one time steps which need to be performed. These will require you to log in to a shell on Sandcastle (SSH). The first step is to create a directory called public_html which is where all your web content will go, the command is: 'mkdir -m 701 public_html'. Next you will need to set up proper permissions on your home directory, first make sure that you are in your home directory the command 'pwd' should return something like /home/std/zz99zz. If you are not in your home directory you can run the command 'cd' to return you to the root of your home directory. Now issue the command 'chmod 701 ./' this will make your public_html directory available to the web server. Now you can add content to your public_html directory, by default the web server will look for a file called index.html so that is where you should start. The permissions of the files should be the following: 644 for HTML files and 701 for sub-directories. If you are not sure what these permission numbers mean you can run the command 'man chmod' on Sandcastle and read up.