Duke NetID

Your Duke NetID is the key for accessing most Duke resources. Most important resources are locked down behind the Duke Shibboleth login service.

OIT Self-Service

All of the following can be accomplished at

• Change your password

• Change your challenge questions

• Set up multi-factor authentication (Duo)

• Change email alias(es)

• Add ssh keys and pick a default shell

Duke email

With your NetID and password, you can access your email on the web at mail.duke.edu

• Your Duke email is not permanent; your account expires once you leave Duke.

• Mail forwarding is possible but not recommended - some messages will silently fail to forward (e.g. anything Duke Health related), so you risk missing them entirely

• There are limitations on the third party email and calendar clients you can use with your Duke email account

  • See https://oit.duke.edu/help/articles/kb0028560/

Duke WiFi

Multi-factor authentication

To access some resources on campus (e.g. mail, VPN, etc.) you will need to periodically undergo MFA when you log in.

You will need to set up Duo first, but once that is done Duke Unlock (passkey) is the better option for day-to-day use

• see instructions at https://idms-mfa.oit.duke.edu/mfa/home

Duke VPN

• Duke’s virtual private network (VPN) allows you to create a secure connection from your computer to Duke over a public network while working remotely. This will be necessary if you want to access certain Duke and DSS resources off campus.

• Instructions to get started with the VPN are available on the next slide. For more information on Duke’s VPN visit https://oit.duke.edu/what-we-do/services/vpn.

Duke VPN set-up

Duke’s internal network

• Much of Duke’s infrastructure, including most DSS servers, lives on Duke’s internal network and uses private IP addresses (10.*).

• These addresses are not reachable from the public internet; you must be on campus (Dukeblue) or connected to the VPN to reach them.

• The hostnames for these machines are served by Duke’s private DNS and only resolve when your device is using Duke’s DNS servers

• Connecting to Dukeblue or the VPN configures all of this automatically, but manually configured DNS servers (e.g. 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8) can override it and these hostnames will fail to resolve.

Software Site Licenses

• Duke offers software for download to students, faculty, and staff through software.duke.edu

• Duke negotiates with vendors to make software available to the Duke community for discounted rates or, in many cases, for free. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please e-mail the site-license office at site@duke.edu.

• Some free software relevant to you as students:

  • Microsoft Office
  • MATLAB & Simulink
  • SAS
  • ChatGPT

  • Mathematica
  • Tableau
  • 1Password
  • Overleaf

Storage & backups

• OneDrive for Business - 1 TB of cloud storage, included with Duke’s Microsoft 365

• Duke Box - 50 GB of cloud storage with file sharing and collaboration features

• Duke GitLab - Duke-hosted git repositories (NetID login), useful for private or Duke-internal code; this bootcamp uses GitHub, covered later today

• See OIT’s Personal Storage page for the full set of options

Backing up your work

Hardware fails, laptops get lost, and files get deleted accidentally - it is a matter of when, not if.

A good rule of thumb is the 3-2-1 rule:

• 3 copies of anything you care about (the original plus 2 backups)

• 2 different types of storage (e.g. your laptop and the cloud)

• 1 copy off site (e.g. OneDrive, Duke Box, or GitHub)

In practice: keep code and documents in git repositories pushed to GitHub, sync your data and everything else with OneDrive or Duke Box, and consider Time Machine (Mac) or File History (Windows) with an external drive for whole-machine backups.

A laptop can be replaced, your dissertation cannot.

Virtual computing

Duke OIT offers virtual software containers and semester-long virtual machines.

• Virtual Software Containers – Students and instructors can reserve personal computer environments running applications such as RStudio, Eclipse, Jupyter Notebooks, MATLAB, and others for a semester. These are run through your web browser; no software download is required.

If you are TAing one of our undergraduate courses you will be using using and supporting these.

Virtual computing - VMs

Virtual Machine (VM) – a small personal VM for your projects / experimentation / learning.

• Run Windows or Linux VMs
• Computing resources are light: 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of memory, and 50 GB of storage
• By default each VM will power down at 6:00 am every morning
  • Can be disabled via the “Automatic power downs” option in VCM

Research Toolkits

https://rtoolkits.web.duke.edu/ is a tool provided by Duke Research Computing to access resources for the DCC.

If you login you should see that you are a member of the “statdept” group.

For PhD students - You can claim the “Doctoral Resources” allocation to get access to the doctoral student partition on the DCC.

Getting help with Duke resources

Duke Office of Information Technology (OIT) manages Duke’s technology infrastructure and application support.

• oit.duke.edu/help

• Live chat - 24 hours a day, Monday - Thursday; chat is available on a limited basis Fridays and Sundays

• Walk up hours are available at the Link in Perkins Library.

• Live service status dashboard available at status.oit.duke.edu or @DukeOIT

For research computing specific questions (DCC, storage, virtual machines, etc.) Duke Research Computing offers support, consultation, and training.

• Email rescomputing@duke.edu

AI @ Duke

Duke AI Suite models

The Duke AI Suite (DukeGPT, MyGPT Builder, and the AI Gateway) provides access to a wide range of models, hosted on-prem at Duke or in the cloud under Duke’s data security agreements.

• General models - the GPT-5 family, Llama 3.3 and 4, gpt-oss, and others

• Specialty models - reasoning, coding, transcription, and embedding models

• duke-current - an alias that always points to a capable current model

The available models change regularly, see the Duke AI Suite Models Guide for the current list and details on each model.

Posit Workbench

The DSS has a Posit Workbench license that will allow you to connect to an instance of RStudio (or Jupyter Lab or VS Code or Positron) in your browser while making use of the computing power of a remote server.

To access Posit Workbench:

1. Navigate to: https://rstudio.stat.duke.edu

2. If off campus, use the VPN to create a secure connection from your computer to Duke.

   If you are on campus, be sure you are connected to the Dukeblue network.

3. Log-in with your NetID and password.

Note - this is a small cluster of 3 machines intended for teaching and smaller workloads. If you need more resources, you should use the DCC directly.

Using the DSS servers

Servers

You can also connect to the individual servers directly via SSH (e.g. ssh netid@server.stat.duke.edu), the same usage rules apply:

• hypatia.stat.duke.edu

• katherinej.stat.duke.edu

• germain.stat.duke.edu

Printers

The department has several printers available to faculty, postdocs, and graduate students. To print you must be connected to Dukeblue:

• Old Chem 211 - HP Color Printer
• Old Chem 211 - Ricoh B&W Printer
• Old Chem 118 - HP Color Printer

See Adding departmental printers to your computer for setup instructions for Mac and Windows. If you have an issue with a department printer email stat-help@duke.edu.

Duke’s ePrint service is also available, with an ePrint printer in Old Chem 211 and stations across campus. Setup instructions are available for Mac and Windows.

Getting help with DSS resources

Departmental IT resources - https://stat.duke.edu/it-support

The best way to get help with DSS computing resources is to email stat-help@duke.edu.

Science Drive - Academic Technology Support

• tts-sciencehelp@duke.edu
• Phone: (919) 684-2200
• https://oit.duke.edu/academic-technology-support-science-drive

If you are having trouble getting support contact the department’s computing committee stat-cc@duke.edu or me.