User FAQs

Information for setting up printing in BII may be found here

Accessing E-Journals

In order to access E-Journals, please go to : https://ejproxy.a-star.edu.sg, provide your BII corporate username and password. This server is maintained by A-Star HQ. It authenticates your password by performing an LDAP lookup against BII's LDAP server. For more detail, A-star Ejournal setup guide is available here.

You must first ssh to ssh.bii-sg.org. If you do not have an SSH client for windows, you can download one from here. At the unix prompt, type "fs listquota .". Here is some sample output :

% fs listquota .
Volume Name                   Quota      Used %Used   Partition
home.james                  3145728   2640325   84%         74%

In the above example, you are using 597929 kbytes out of your 3000000 kbytes of disk quota. Also, you own 2449 files, out of a maximum of 50000 files.

Please take a look at this quick guide.

Please contact the systems team for assistance. You may obtain the instructions on setting up the VPN from - here.

For all purchases, an email must be sent to sysadmin@bii-sg.org by your supervisor. Refer to IT Policy 14.1 on details on what must be in this email. Whatever you request for purchase must be directly relavent to the project assigned to you. Thus your project and your expected project deliverables must be clearly spelt out. The IT systems team will first check if they have the requested item in stock, failing which an order will be placed. Managers may approve items less than $2000. Items exceeding this amount will be approved by the IT committee chairman.

Whenever a staff joins, the IT systems department will setup a "standard" PC, either from existing stock or will purchase one. At the time of writing, a "standard" PC is one which is valued at about S$2,000. The "standard" commercial software supplied is MS Windows 2000/XP, MS Office and an Anti-Virus utility. If the supervisor feels that the staff requires a particular type of platform (eg high-end graphics card, etc), the supervisor must inform the IT systems team before hand. The availability of the PC is subject to whether the IT systems team has the item, otherwise it is subject to purchase lead time from a vendor. Any request for any hardware (or software) beyond that of the "standard issue", requires justification which must be submitted by the supervisor. Please send email to sysadmin@bii.a-star.edu.sg, do include estimated cost, detailed explainations for the extra hardware/software required as well as project deliverables.

Sunray thin clients are currently available to all BII staff. They are quick to setup since they have no harddrives, CPU, or memory (immune to viruses too!). All Sunray clients are powered by a Solaris 10, managed by the IT Systems Team. Software needs to be maintained in one server and all Sunray users will automatically get it. Current software available include StarOffice, Mozilla, Gimp, MySQL and several other opensource packages.