Christopher Wei

21 Feb 2016

I wanted to map out somewhere I spend a lot of time on and originally I thought hey I’ve been at Gates quite a lot this semester, but in reality I was more in Andrew File Server than anything. The server hosts a lot of the CS and ECE crowd who use the server to typically write and run programs related to their classes – mostly because the AFS environment have everything set up for them to do whatever they need to do without having to install it locally.

What is awesome about AFS is that it is inherently a file system running on Linux, which gives me access to commands such as finger, users, who and w — which reveals quite a lot of information about the people logged into the file server. Is this legal? I think so. I will have to check with Computing Services before I start.

I think mapping out who is logged in at what times and what they are doing at that time is pretty cool. Just by SSHing into AFS at this moment reveals that in just one unix machine, there are over 10 students running vim or emacs on a file called “hw06.sml” and another 5 or so users running /usr/local/bin/sml which tells me that a 15-150 homework is due fairly soon.

 

EXAMPLE ~~ ~~

I think I should omit the example for now… until I get the A-ok from CMU