A collection of tips and tricks to do with computing at ManchesterUniversity.
POP3 or IMAP for students at ManchesterUniversity
If you have more than one email account and think that webmail is by far the worst way of keeping track of them, then you might have thought of collecting all your email in one account and dealing with it there instead of having to surf to 43 different websites. ManchesterUniversity seems to discourage their students from being efficient when it comes to reading their email, they make it really, really hard to forward your emails to a different account (and it does not work reliably). The next best thing to look for is POP or IMAP access so you can at least collect it from the university. The IT service desk helpfully asks:"student or staff?", if you click student it will tell you that POP or IMAP is a no no for you. If you are staff then after some more clicking finally they tell you "imap is ok", after some more clicking, finally they reveal "POP is available too". Pfeew. Here the details you really need:
- POP3 host: email.manchester.ac.uk
- IMAP host: email.manchester.ac.uk, port 143 (using TLS) or 993 (using SSL)
- SMTP: outgoing.manchester.ac.uk, port 587 (TLS)
- for all of them use your central account name and password as credentials
Printing in the HEP department
Only machines on the inside of the HEP firewall may print to either of the printers on the sixth floor. This means many cluster machines, many of the linux8.hep.man.ac.uk, can not talk to the printers. It also means that if you laptop is not plugged in to the right socket or is using the university wireless, you can not print. A way around that is to ssh to linux.hep.man.ac.uk (or more specifically pc92.hep.man.ac.uk) and start acrobat there, hit print.
Alternatively, configure the cupsd on your laptop to expect a printer at socket://localhost:9100 and use the following ssh port forwarding magic: ssh -L9100:194.36.2.10:9100 pc93.hep.man.ac.uk. This will connect you through to the colour laser on the sixth floor. It is probably a good idea to use linux.hep.man.ac.uk instead of pc93 as hosts may go away unexpectedly.
Browsing with a ManchesterUniversity IP address
A lot of journals and so on will grant you access to their archives if you appear to come from a IP address belonging to the university. If you are not plugged in to the university network you can use a proxy server, it will ask you for your university login&password once an dyou will get access to all places which you can access with ATHENS details and even some that do not provide a way to login via ATHENS. To configure your browser click Edit->Preferences, go to the Advanced tab and click Settings for Connection. Then enter http://wwwconfig.umist.ac.uk/config.pac as automatic proxy configuration url.