The following is included in your Biostat account:
- A home directory accessible by you and only by you. The beginning quota is 100GB but may be increased if necessary.
- Access to shared group directories (depending on which group(s) you belong to) where files are shared among members of a group.
- Access to temporary workspace (/tmp and /scratch). These are temporary working areas, and should not be used to store data you wish to store or access other than in a short term manner.
- Access to printers.
- Access to servers, both Linux and Windows, which have statistical applications (R, SAS, STATA, MatLab, MPlus, etc.)
- Access to Windows remote desktop servers with applications you might not have on your own workstation (Adobe Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, Internet Explorer, etc.)
- Access to a Linux remote desktop server with a standard set of Linux computational and productivity applications.
- A <username>@biostat.wisc.edu email address. If this is your primary address, then you can access it via email client or web client. If this is not your primary address (you have a dual appointment in more than one department, for example, or you are a student), then this is an alias that points to your primary email address. In either case, we must be able to contact you about emergency situations and a biostat address/alias is the best way for us to do that.
In addition, you may have a Linux, Windows, or Macintosh workstation or laptop which we support.
Linux Workstation (desktop only)
This will have a standard set of utilities and applications including the following: Emacs, Firefox (web browser), LaTeX, MatLab, OpenOffice, Python, R, SAS, and Thunderbird (email client). Other software may be installed on request.
Windows
This will have the following applications: Office 2010 Pro (Access, Excel, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Powerpoint, Word), Acrobat X Pro, Secure CRT (ssh client), SecureFX (ftp client), X-win32 (X-windows client), NX client (for Linux remote desktop server), 7-Zip (compress/extract archives), Thunderbird (email client), Firefox (web browser), Pidgin (chat), as well as antivirus and anti-malware software. Java, Flash, and Adobe will be updated by us. If you are a statistician, you may also have R, Rstudio, SAS, notepad++ (text editor), MikTex (a version of LaTeX for Windows), and Ghostview (for viewing postscript files) should you so desire. Other software may be installed on request.
Macintosh
This will have the applications included with Mac OSX as well as other software such as Microsoft Office 2011, Remote Desktop (for connecting to Windows servers), NX client (for Linux remote desktop server), and R. Other software may be installed on request.
Remote Connections
You will be able to connect to our servers and to your desktop workstation remotely from off-campus using GlobalProtect, the campus VPN client. For this, you will need to point to the portal smph.vpn.wisc.edu instead of uwmadison.vpn.wisc.edu. Please contact BCG support with any VPN connections issues or questions.
(Please Note: Individuals with their static vpn IP addresses configured for our department’s firewall access can access our servers using the portal uwmadison.vpn.wisc.edu).