Spires Computer—Help for Account Owners
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Maybe this web page is not for you
Most users of the Spires computer do not have accounts of their own on the computer. When they login, they go directly into General Access Prism after entering a PIN. This web page is not for those users—you should return to our page about using General Access Prism on Spires. Most users of the Spires computer will use it without owning their own account.
If you do have an account on Spires, it is almost certainly because you need to do one or more of the following things:
- use the SPIRES database program for access to the files or data you need, for example, the SPIDERS or A-PLAC applications
- upload or download data between the Spires computer and your personal computer (the SFTP, Secure File Transfer Protocol, procedure)
- own or maintain a Prism application, which requires you to work with metadata, like the file definition or help records, directly in SPIRES
Though we can tell the General Access Prism users that Prism on the Spires computer works almost exactly the same as it does on Forsythe, we have to tell you that working with your own account on Spires is quite different from on Forsythe. That's mainly because the operating system on the Spires computer is UNIX, very different from Forsythe's MVS from IBM. Most Forsythe commands are invalid on Spires, at least until you explicitly invoke a program like WYLBUR or SPIRES.
What you should know as a Spires account owner—the basics
The numbered points below are important and fairly basic things you should know as a Spires account owner, listed in increasing order of complexity and decreasing order of necessity. In other words, if you get to a point where you don't understand something or don't think it's relevant to you, you've probably read and learned enough.
- If you need help using these programs on Spires to do the work you need to do, submit a HelpSU ticket and we'll try to help. We cannot help you program or develop new functionality on Spires —the machine's sole purpose is to extend existing functionality temporarily, and that is all ITS can support.
- Your Spires username (on Forsythe, it was called your "account number") is almost certainly your SUNet ID. For example, if your SUNet ID is jdoe, then you are logged into Spires as user jdoe. There are very few exceptions.
- When you login, you are on a UNIX computer, and so you can issue any UNIX commands you want, such as ls, more, cd, etc. Being familiar with basic UNIX can be helpful. However, depending on your needs, there is a good chance you won't need to know UNIX at all. Most users will not. This web page will not assume that you do.
- The most common and important commands to know right
away are these:
- spires - to enter the SPIRES data base management program
- prism - to enter the Prism program
- gaprism - to enter Prism through the General Access gateway
- wylbur - to enter the WYLBUR text-editing program
- spibild—to enter the SPIRES file-building program
- exit - to exit any of those programs
- logout—to end your Spires computer session (not logoff, as on Forsythe)
- In general, when you are inside any of those programs (SPIRES, Prism, WYLBUR), you can work with them the same way you did on Forsythe in order to work with SPIRES data. Most of the same commands are available, and they work as you'd expect. In particular, remember the explain and help commands in SPIRES and the help command in WYLBUR.
- What doesn't work the same? Hundreds of commands
do, dozens don't. The ones that do work differently
or don't work at all generally involve these areas:
- printing
- You cannot print from WYLBUR, but you can print from SPIRES and Prism. Prism's print command works more or less as it does/did on Forsythe. SPIRES supports the print command, again, more or less the way it worked (in WYLBUR) on Forsythe. But again, there is no support for print within WYLBUR.
- You can print to an attached printer in Prism by choosing the attached printer option.
- To print to an attached printer from the SPIRES program, you would add dest=attached (exactly like that, with attached in lowercase) to your print command. The lprint command is not supported.
- Many print options work, including indent, cc, unnumbered, etc.
- the active file and the file systems
- communication to other users (email, to command, etc.).
- Email is allowed as an option from Prism printing and from the SPIRES program (the mail to and send commands). It is not available from WYLBUR.
- the batch system (there is no batch system on Spires)
- the accounting/charging system for Forsythe accounts
As the details above suggest, some commands do work in these areas, but don't expect all of them to. Experimenting before expecting a command to work is recommended.
- printing
- When commands you issue in the SPIRES and SPIBILD
programs involve the active file, they automatically
read from or write to whatever file is named by the
show active or use
commands. By default, this is a file named active.file
saved in your UNIX home directory: You should consider
this file a scratch pad whose contents will change
as you issue commands; you should not think of it
as just another stored file with permanent contents,
as you would with any other saved UNIX file. That
guideline applies to all active files—see the note
on multiple active files below.
-Welcome to SPIRES 03.11
-> show active
/home/jdoe/active.file
-> use abc
-> show active
/home/jdoe/abc
->
Several basic WYLBUR commands are available within SPIRES that let you see and modify the contents of the active file, such as list, change and modify. In SPIRES, for details, explain wylbur commands, unix emulator. More commands, including view, are available within the WYLBUR program itself, if you need them—see #7. [Warning: Do not issue the view command inside SPIRES—it gets interpreted as vi, the name of a different text-editing program in UNIX. If you issue the command by accident, you can get out of vi by pressing the Escape key, followed by a colon (:), followed by a lowercase "q".]In SPIRES, you also have the option to work with multiple active files if you need them. In SPIRES, explain active files, unix emulator for details.
- The WYLBUR program can be called from inside or
outside of the SPIRES program. Since the basic WYLBUR
text-editing commands are built into SPIRES, many
users won't need to explicitly invoke WYLBUR at all.
However, its main benefits as a separate program are:
- full-screen text-editing, with the view command—you may need to precede this command with the command set terminal samson to get a color screen and functional function keys
- WYLBUR exec file processing
SFTP—moving data between Spires and your personal computer
Moving data between the Forsythe computer and your personal computer was done through special programming on Forsythe and in Samson, the terminal emulator program you use. ITS is unable to provide the same customized, direct support for the UNIX platform, which the Spires computer uses. However, by using an additional software program alongside Samson, available free through the Essential Stanford Software web site, you can easily move files back and forth between your computer and Spires using drag-and-drop techniques.
The software program you'll use employs a networking protocol called SFTP, for Secure File Transfer Protocol. This is far preferable to an FTP program, which can be used for the same purpose but does not work securely —the data, and perhaps more dangerously, your SUNet password, crosses the network unencrypted, a security risk that Stanford is trying hard to wipe out. Regular FTP may in fact be blocked on Spires by the time you read this.
As you might expect, the software programs are different, depending on whether you have a Windows or Macintosh computer. In each case, you should go to the linked ESS page below, download the software, and read the "Configuration" or "Installation" instructions under the "Documentation" banner. Your Hostname for the Spires machine is "spires.stanford.edu", and your Username is your SunetID. Your Password is that associated with your SunetID.
Download for Windows 2000 or XP: SecureFX
Download for Macintosh: Fetch
Be sure to apply the serial number for Fetch.
On the Macintosh you can use "sftp" within Terminal.app to transfer files. You establish a connection using a command such as "sftp sunetid@spires.stanford.edu" and then use "get" or "put" or "mget" or "mput" and then finally "quit".
