The VM and your CS Department Home Directory

You will write and run a lot of programs this semester, so the question of where to do this work is important, as is the question of where to store it. We'll take some time in class to address that question.

  1. Where to work. You will be writing and running your programs either on the CS Department Unix lab machines, or on the VM you've installed on your laptop. You will probably want to bounce back and forth - work on something in the lab, continue work on your laptop VM later.
  2. Where to store your work. You have three basic places to store files
    1. your laptop's filesystem,
    2. your VM's filesystem, or
    3. your CS Department home directory.
    Storing stuff on your laptop's Windows filesystem is not a very convenient option because the writing, compiling and running will be happening either on the CS Department Unix lab machines or on your VM. Anything on your laptop's Windows filesystem would have to be constantly copied back and forth.

    Storing stuff on your VM's filesystem is nice in some ways - you can work regardless of whether or not you have network access, for example. On the other hand, it's got some serious negatives. If your laptop dies you lose all your work. If the file on your laptop that contains the VM's state gets corrupted, you lose all your work. Finally, the work you do in the lab is not available on your VM and vice versa, undless you go back to constantly copying files back and forth. So ...

    ... storing stuff in your CS Department home directory is the best option. It's backed up nightly, accessible from the computer lab and, thanks to the "csunixmount" script that's preloaded on your VMs, it's accessible from your VM - as long as you have a network connection.

  3. Our recommendation. Use the csunixmount script and keep everything in your CS Department home directory.
    4. Warning! If you "pause" your VM before exiting VMPlayer (as opposed to shutting the VM down), you should run the csunixunmount script first, otherwise things may not resume properly when you "unpause" your VM.

A quick activity to demonstrate and verify that it's working: 

1. in your VM home directory, type the ls command.  Note the directory "csunix".
   Type 'cd csunix', then 'ls'.  Note: it's empty.
   Type 'cd ..' to go back to your home directory.

2. run csunixmount
   cd to csunix again and do an ls.  Now there's a file README.
   Give command cat README

3. Type the command cd ~  (takes you back to your VM home directory)
   Type the command csunixunmont
   do ls csunix (now it's empty again)
   do csunixmount (files are back!)