CSE Superuser Conduct Guidelines

This is a general review of the rights and responsibilities of anyone who has a root account on the CSE systems.

 

  1. You have a root account to do certain necessary parts of your job. Do not use your root account at any other time.

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  2. Use your root account as little as possible. Do not stay logged in as root when you do not need to work as root.

     

  3. Be careful. Mistakes you make when working as root can affect hundreds of people, not only yourself. If you make a mistake or have a problem you cannot quickly fix on your own, get help! There is no dishonor in asking for help. We all make mistakes and need help from time to time.

     

  4. You do not, under any conditions, have the right to inspect the contents of any files owned by users. As pointed out in the ruling on acceptable use, there are fuzzy areas here involving spool files and tmp files, and you may remove troublesome files in public areas, but the right of privacy is to be assumed in all cases.

     

  5. Only a user can give you permission to inspect the contents of hir files or make those files accessible to other people. No one in the department, staff or faculty, has the power to override the privacy of a user's files! User files are private. Unless the user can be contacted for permission, we cannot access hir files or give permission for anyone else to do so. Period. (But see the CSE policy on research accounts for discussion of what files are considered to be owned by users.)

     

  6. Email is sacrosanct. You may not ever, without the user's permission, look at the contents of email. This applies to email in any form, in any directory, at any time.

Violation of #4 or #6 is cause for immediately losing your job, and possibly being asked to leave MSU if you are a student. This is serious stuff. Don't take it lightly!

You must be familiar with the Administrative Ruling Acceptable Use of Computing Systems, Software, and the University Digital Network, available in this section.