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RRS Ernest Shackleton Computing Facilities

These facilities are on board and available for BAS cruises and will not necessarily be available to External personnel when the vessel is on hire during North Sea work

Hardware for general use:

  • 3 Viglen Pentium 4 PC's in the Dry Lab; fitted with DVD R/W drives and connected to the LAN (removed during North Sea work).
  • 3 Viglen Pentium 4 PC's in the Client Office; fitted with DVD R/W drives and connected to the LAN (removed during North Sea work).
  • 1 Black and White Laserjet printer (A4) connected to the LAN.
  • 1 Colour Laserjet printer (A4) connected to the LAN

Local Area Network (LAN):

  • The LAN is CAT5e with RJ45 type connection only.
  • All cabins are fitted with LAN access ports. Scientific areas also have spare ports available.
  • The Satellite link has a total bandwidth of 128Kb (IE probably twenty times slower than your broadband link at home). This has to cope with the traffic for everyone on board, including Voip telephone calls, work data, remote access, web browsing and email. Many people bring web "toys" onboard only to find they do not work as well as they might hope.
  • If providing your own PC/Laptop (both work and personal), network cables are available onboard. The Communications Manager will assist you in connecting your PC/laptop to the LAN providing you have a sufficiently secure machine (patched and running anti-virus) with the correct hardware and software. If you are unsure, it is better to contact the IT helpdesk at BAS Cambridge prior to departure for more information. (Contact the Helpdesk on +44 (0)1223 221447 or send an email to helpdesk@bas.ac.uk).

Server:

  • The server is fully spared, secure and backed up
  • You will be allocated with an account and 1Gb of server disk space for your personal/work use. This space can be increased at the discretion of the Radio Officer.
  • Your account and all files will be deleted upon leaving the ship.

Software:

  • The standard operating system for PC's is Windows XP Professional
  • XP Home, Vista, MacOS, linux are not compatible with BAS systems although can connect to the LAN for limited access to resources. Must be secured with anti-virus software.
  • Software packages available from the server to networked PCs include:
    • Microsoft Office 2007 Professional (word, excel, powerpoint, access)
    • CorelDRAW suite
    • email via IMAP (for BAS staff only, non-BAS staff should use a web based email service such as gmail (gmail has a low bandwidth version which works better than most))
    • Adobe Acrobat (reader and writer)
    • WinZip
    • Firefox
  • All BAS PCs run Sophos Anti-Virus.
  • All Laptop users should bring with them all driver and recovery disks related to their equipment.

Consumables:

  • There are NO spare media on board for any use. This includes blank CDs or DVDs, or floppy disks. You must supply your own media.
  • There is a limited supply of A4 paper for printing purposes.

Backups:

  • The Server is backed up on a daily basis to LTO tape. All files that are stored on your N: drive (personal account space) will be backed up.
  • No backups are taken of the PCs local hard drives. You are responsible for backing up any files that you place on the PC local drives.

Email:

  • For BAS staff email is via IMAP (IE using Thunderbird). Full instructions will be given on joining.
  • Non-BAS staff will have to use a web based email service such as hotmail or googlemail.
  • You should bring with you the full e-mail addresses of all those people that you wish to contact (both personal and work). Once you are South it may be difficult to 'lookup' email addresses.
  • The maximum size for any email both work related and personal is currently 10Mb, but please try to keep all emails/images much smaller. A standard text only email is about 5Kb.
  • All your email will be deleted once you leave the ship (BAS staff only).

Security:

  • If you are bringing your own laptop it must have up to date anti-virus software on it. For personal use, we recommend NOD32 by ESET software (http://www.eset.co.uk/Products/SmartSecurity). Please bring the laptop to the Radio Officer before plugging in to the network.