COMP3000 Operating Systems 2023F Tutorials

This page contains Tutorial instructions for COMP3000 A, Fall 2023.

The main page for the course can be found here.

Information about the Tutorials

Tutorials are in person. You need to be physically in the room to finish up the tutorial instructions on your laptop and get checked-out by one of the two present TAs. Your TA will be your first point of contact when you have questions or encounter any issues during the tutorial session.

Please stick to the tutorial session you are registered in. This avoids overcrowding.

Make well use of these tutorials to help you better understand the course material. The plan is to have 9 tutorial sessions this term, each would be worth 2.22% of your total grade. We might revisit this as the term progresses.

Read through the instructions before starting your work to get an overall picture. When source files are needed, you can download them by clicking on the hyperlink.

Getting Started

For the tutorials, you need to get access to a Linux machine. It is recommended to use an SCS Openstack instance (see instructions below). Alternatively, if you prefer to work directly on your laptop and avoid Openstack, you can also download this VirtualBox image (courtesy of Prof. Zhao from Winter 2023). You will need access to a Linux system for the entire semester, ideally the same one.

Setting up an Openstack VM instance for the first time

We will use Openstack for the tutorials of this course. Follow these instructions for setting up an Openstack VM instance: instructions here. You only need to do this once for the whole term. Please use the same instance for both: the tutorials and the assignments. No need to create two instances.

Interacting with your Openstack VM instance

You can find instructions with various ways to connect to your Openstack instance here.

To download files from your Openstack VM instance, you can find instructions here.

Reminder: do not take snapshots of your instance!

You need to ssh to your VM instance, to do the tutorial work. Windows 10/11, Ubuntu and MacOS all have SSH clients available from their command lines. Just type "ssh student@<IP address>" where the IP address is the floating IP address you assigned to your VM. Other tools supporting SSH (e.g., PuTTY) also work. Once you are prompted to log in, the default user is student, default password is student. You'll have to change your password once you are first logged in. (If you want to change your password later, use the passwd command.)

For various alternative ways to access your instance, refer to here (using the -J option is recommended; take a look).

The image provides an "scs-backup" command that will backup the student user's directory to the SCS linux machines. So if your SCS username is janedoe, you can type:

scs-backup janedoe

and it will create a copy of everything in the student account’s home directory (note: you can customize it) in a directory called "COMP3000VM-backup" in your SCS home directory. You can ssh/sftp to access.scs.carleton.ca in order to access this copy of your VM's files. You should do backups at the end of every session and before you do anything dangerous.

Note that you cannot take snapshots of your VM, so please don't try (it will keep trying and never succeed, and you'll make work for the tech staff who have to cancel what you did).

Tutorial Sections

• COMP 3000 A1: Tue: 08:35 - 09:55 at Loeb 720 (LA720). [Ethan and Nilofar (T1-T9)]
• COMP 3000 A2: Fri: 11:35 - 12:55 at Loeb 720 (LA720). [Ethan and Ali (T1-T3), Ethan and Nareen (T4-T6), Ali and Nareen (T7-T9)]
• COMP 3000 A3: Thu: 08:35 - 09:55 at St. Patrick's 303 (SP303). [Ali and Nareen (T1-T9)]

Tutorial Schedules

Tutorial	Section	Date	Time	Room	TAs
Tutorial 1	A1	Sep 26	8:35 am-9:55 am	LA720	Ethan and Nilofar
	A3	Sep 28	8:35 am-9:55 am	SP303	Ali and Nareen
	A2	Sep 29	11:35 am-12:55 pm	LA720	Ethan and Ali