Community Forum

The COSMOS Community Forum is an integrated discussion platform where testbed users can ask questions, share experiment results, discuss techniques and best practices, report issues, and get help from both the user community and testbed administrators. It is built on Discourse, a modern forum platform, and is tightly integrated with the COSMOS Portal.

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Accessing the Forum

The Community Forum is accessible from the portal sidebar under My Account, directly below the Dashboard link. Clicking Community Forum opens the forum in a popup window (700 × 800 pixels) that you can resize and position alongside the main portal window.

This popup design is intentional — it lets you keep the forum open for reference or discussion while simultaneously working with the scheduler, status pages, or other portal features in the main window.

Single Sign-On

The forum uses single sign-on (SSO) with the COSMOS Portal. This means:

• If you are already logged into the portal, clicking Community Forum automatically signs you into the forum — no additional login is required.
• Your forum username matches your portal username.
• Your forum profile (name, email) is synchronized from your portal account.
• You do not need to create a separate forum account or remember a separate password.

If you are not logged into the portal when you try to access the forum, you will be prompted to enter your portal credentials first.

Notification Badge

When other users post new topics or reply to discussions you are participating in, a small red notification badge appears next to the Community Forum link in the portal sidebar. The badge shows the number of unread notifications and updates automatically every 60 seconds.

This lets you stay aware of forum activity without keeping the forum window open constantly.

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Forum Categories

The forum is organized into topic categories to help you find relevant discussions:

Category	Description
Announcements	Official testbed announcements from administrators — maintenance windows, new features, system changes. Check here for important updates.
Getting Started	Questions and answers for new users. If you are running your first experiment, learning the OMF tools, or setting up your SSH access, this is a good place to ask.
Experiments	Discussion about running experiments on the testbed — sharing techniques, reporting results, coordinating multi-user setups, and troubleshooting experiment-specific issues.
SDR & RF	Topics related to software-defined radio and RF equipment — USRP configuration, GNU Radio pipelines, antenna setups, spectrum analysis, and RF calibration.
Troubleshooting	Help with problems and debugging — nodes not booting, imaging failures, network connectivity issues, software compatibility, and other technical problems.
Feature Requests	Suggestions for improvements to the testbed, portal, or supporting tools. The testbed team monitors this category for community input.

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How to Use the Forum

Reading Topics

Browse topics by clicking a category name on the forum home page. Topics are listed with the most recently active at the top. Each topic shows:

• The title and a preview of the first post
• The author and when it was created
• The number of replies and views
• The last person to reply and when

Click any topic to read the full discussion thread.

Posting a New Topic

1. Click New Topic (or the + button) at the top of the forum
2. Select the appropriate category from the dropdown
3. Enter a descriptive title that summarizes your question or topic
4. Write your post in the editor. The forum supports rich formatting:
   • Markdown for text formatting (bold, italic, headers, lists)
   • Code blocks — wrap code in triple backticks for syntax highlighting
   • File attachments — drag and drop images or files into the editor
   • Mentions — type @username to notify a specific user
5. Click Create Topic to publish

Replying to Topics

Click the Reply button at the bottom of a topic to add your response. You can also reply to a specific post within a thread by clicking the reply arrow on that individual post — this creates a threaded reply that shows the context.

Best Practices for Getting Help

When posting a question or reporting a problem:

• Include your setup — which testbed domain, which nodes, what image you loaded
• Show your commands — paste the exact omf commands you ran and their output
• Describe expected vs. actual behavior — what you expected to happen and what actually happened
• Include error messages — copy and paste the full error, not just a summary
• Use code blocks — wrap terminal output and code in triple backticks for readability

Good example:

I'm running on sb3.orbit-lab.org and loaded baseline-uhd.ndz on node1-1 and node1-2.
After imaging, node1-2 won't power on:

```
$ omf tell on -t node1-2
node1-2.sb3.orbit-lab.org: FAILED - timeout waiting for power on
```

node1-1 works fine. I tried `omf tell reset -t node1-2` but got the same result.
Any suggestions?

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Forum Etiquette

• Search before posting — your question may already have been answered. Use the search bar at the top of the forum.
• Use meaningful titles — "Help!" is not useful; "omf load timeout on sb1.cosmos after 15 minutes" helps everyone.
• Stay on topic — post in the appropriate category.
• Be respectful — the forum is a professional space shared by researchers, students, and engineers from around the world.
• Mark solutions — if someone's reply solves your problem, mark it as the solution so others can find the answer quickly.

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Privacy and Access

The COSMOS Community Forum is internal only — it is not publicly accessible on the Internet and is not indexed by search engines. Only users with valid COSMOS/ORBIT portal accounts can view or post content. This means you can safely discuss experiment details, share intermediate results, and ask candid questions about testbed usage without concern about public exposure.

Self-registration on the forum is disabled. Account creation is handled exclusively through the COSMOS Portal single sign-on mechanism.