McNair Staff Help
Welcome to the Baker Institute's McNair Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation!
This page will get you - our newest team member - started on setting up your own account on the Wiki and navigating its content management prowess.
If you are part of our technical staff, please follow the instructions for New Tech Staff instead of this page.
User Account
User Page
Every McNair staff maintains his own personal wikipage, detailing administrative information and professional/academic background, alongside a short autobiography.
Refer to Dylan's Wikipage for inspiration. Or refer to the comprehensive staff list.
Create your own Wikipage by going to Form:McNair_Staff and filing out the form. On the first page of the form use your Full Name with spaces (like Ed Egan), not your username. Fill out the fields. For the image, upload one (see "Upload file" in the left Wiki sidebar) and just put the name of the file in the box (e.g. YourPic.jpg). Finally go to your user page (click your username at the top of the page), edit that page and include the following line:
#REDIRECT [[Full Name]]
Faculty Members to the McNair Center should also fill out a page. Please use this form Form:McNair_Faculty.
Working with the Wiki
At McNair, the Wiki is both home to developed content in the form of an independent public Wikipage, and developing content that will serve a academic paper, issue brief or blog post in the future. It is the research team's main tool for knwoledge sharing, pooling resources, writing and peer-editing.
To get started,
- Basic Wiki Markup Guide
- Forms and Templates - Working with pre-existing ones and making new ones
- When in doubt, contact Ed or ask a friend!
Useful resources from wikipedia:
You should also be creating pages for identified topic areas and to keep track of your projects. You must secure your pages by adding them to Category:Internal or some other appropriate category, so that they are available only to McNair staff and faculty. If you try to create a page that already exists the form will redirect you to edit that page.
Working with the infrastructure
The RDP, Storing Data, and the Dbase Server
At McNair, key software and processing power is made accessible to your personal laptop through the Remote Desktop Connection. Follow the link for instructions (Good luck!).
That page also contains details about How to Map the network drive and Connecting to the database server.
All of your day-to-day data should be stored on the E: drive of the RDP. Generally, you should create a folder for each project that you work on and store your data in:
E:\McNair\Projects\YOURPROJECT
Working with our PostgreSQL Server
Only tab-delimited text files that contain data that is being moved on or off the database server should be copied to the database servers bulk drive. Again create folders there to organize your data. Your folder's name should be the same as your database's name (case sensitive to avoid confusion). Note that some legacy folders and databases do not follow this schema.
To make your life easy, map the database's bulk drive on your RDP account. Follow the instructions to do this. We refer to the database server's bulk drive as either 181/bulk (where 181 is the last segment of its address) or as Z:, as this is the drive letter most commonly mapped to.
There are detailed instructions on Working with PostgreSQL, that include how to connect to the server, make dbases, and write SQL.
For first timers, you should also read How to do a Simple Database Project.
Using our Git Server
Our Git Server is hosted on the RDP Server. Connect as follows:
- From the RDP: https://localhost/codebase/
- From the anywhere: https://rdp.mcnaircenter.org/codebase/ or https://128.42.44.182/codebase/
See the Software Repository page for full details of how to use the Git server, and the Software Repository Listing to see a list of (some of) the software stored there.
Publishing through McNair Accounts
- Find one article per week and send it to the "twitter" Slack channel.
- Ramee Saleh is our twitter point person. She has access to Hootsuite as well. Contact her with any publishing questions.
Blog
The McNair Center Blog was at http://mcnair.bakerinstitute.org/blog.
McNair researchers can access the back-end of the blog at http://mcnair.bakerinstitute.org/blog/wp-admin. Contact Anne, Ed, or a blog editor (see the Blog Team) for an account.
Blog posts are an important output at the McNair Center. Our page on Writing Blog Posts provides lists of pages in development, and links to details on our Blog Team, Blog Writing Process, Working with Wordpress and other crucial information. Peer editing is an important part of our process. Please keep the Peer Editor Schedule up to date.
Workday Norms
- Upon arrival at work, please sign in to the McNair RDP. This is how we track your physical attendance at McNair.
- After signing into the RDP, please fill out your Work Log. This should include your intended accomplishments for the day (preferably with links to pages you worked on!) For more details see Writing your Work Log.
"Everything that you see and hear and live is made by other people; feel free to change it." - Steve Jobs
Setting up Someone Else's Account
NOTE: In order to do this part, you need to have administrator access on the RDP and the Wiki.
Setting Up an RDP Account
1. Open the Server Manager. (Second button from the left on the bottom toolbar.)
2. In the Upper Right hand corner, select Tools -> Active Directory Users and Computers. A box will pop up.
3. On the left hand side of this box, there is a folder titled "Users". Right click on that folder, and select New -> User.
4. Fill in the fields, and select Next.
5. On the next screen, enter your password. Unselect the box "user must change password on next login", and check the box "password never expires".
6. Select Next, review your entries, and hit "Finish".
7. There now should be a little person icon in the "Users" folder with your name on it.
8. Remember this Username and Password. This is how you will log onto the RDP.
Adding Someone to a Privileged Group
Certain groups have more administrative access on the RDP. If someone needs to be added to a group, you can do this in the same window as the previous section.
1. As before, Open the Server Manager, go to Tools -> Active Directory Users and Computers, and double click on the "Users" folder.
2. Find your User in the Users folder. Right click on the User, and select the option "Add to a group...".
3. Here, you need to know what group your User needs to be added to. Type it in the box, and if it is a valid group, the name will be underlined. Then hit OK.
Getting onto the RDP
1. Go to the App Store (Mac) or whatever Windows uses, and search for the application, "Microsoft Remote Desktop." It should be the first application in the results. The logo is an orange box with a computer in it. Download it.
2. Open it.
3. Select the "New" button (the big +). Enter the following information:
| McNairRDP | |
| PcName | rdp.mcnaircenter.org |
| Username | ad0\yourUsernameFromEarlier |
| Password | yourPasswordFromEarlier |
Leave other values at their default value.
