The fundamental usage policy is that computer users must act in a responsible manner. As the CSE Computing Systems are shared resources, all users must be careful not to infringe upon the rights or convenience of other users. Do not assume that you are the only (or most important) user currently on the system (even a workstation). Treat others as you would have them treat you. Do not act as if you have the right to more of our shared resources than any other user.
Your CSE computing account is granted for instructional or research purposes only. It is granted to you, and to you only. Sharing your account with anyone will result in immediate cancellation of your computing privileges.
DON'T ever eat or drink in the IN (Instructional) labs.
DON'T disturb others with loud talk or music.
DON'T produce offensive graphics, messages, news posts, etc.
DON'T xlock a terminal for more than 10 minutes.
DON'T play computer games in a lab that is more than half-full, during scheduled lab sessions, or at all during the last 5 weeks of classes each semester.
Please don't touch the workstation monitor's screens.
Please clean up your work area of newspapers, papers, etc. when you leave.
NEVER touch the power switch on a workstation. If it is hung, send email to manager. If it is off, there is a reason. Do not power-cycle the machines; you may cause serious damage to the system disks or corrupt the OS.
Account Creation Policy . Accounts for registered students are created within two weeks of the start of each semester (guest accounts are available during that time).
Account Removal Policy . All accounts for registered Computer Science related majors (CSE, CPE, LBS) remain active through the semester following the user's departure from the program. These account holders are notified at least two weeks prior to the account's deletion. All other normal user accounts are removed immediately after the last day of the semester enrolled. Accounts may also be terminated or suspended at any time for violation of the rules contained herein.
Disk Quota Policy . Each user is granted an equitable share of our storage resources. Students are given a disk quota of 50Mb (CSE graduate students get 100Mb). Requests for disk quota increases may be granted with a valid reason and a faculty sponsor; such increases are temporary (for the duration of the project or class) and rare. Faculty sponsors should contact manager@cse.msu.edu to request an increase. There may be additional disk space allocated to you for class work in specific classes, or for research together with a faculty sponsor. That extra allocation is not considered an extension of your private, personal disk space, and as such does not count as part of your personal disk quota. However, any files you place in that space may be inspected, deleted, altered or have your ownership of them removed at any time should the faculty sponsor or the class instructor feel that it is necessary to do so. Please see http://www.cse.msu.edu/facility/security/res_policy.html for further clarification.
Print Quota Policy . Each user is granted a page quota of 450 pages per semester. Users who exceed this quota may buy an additional 100 pages by purchasing a ream of unpunched standard white printer paper (19410-0) from the MSU Bookstore, and bringing it (unopened, with receipt) to the help desk (3300EB). Printing services are provided to students exclusively for instructional or supported research purposes. Students found abusing this will be denied further printing privileges.
Mail Queue Policy . Each user is expected to maintain his/her mail queue (unread or saved mail in /var/mail/$USER) at a reasonable size (certainly below 1Mb). Users regularly exceeding this size are contacted by the system staff; if the situation continues, your email access may be terminated and arriving email will be returned to sender. Warning: Do not remain subscribed to e-mail lists while on vacation or internship unless you plan to regularly check -- and prune -- your e-mail.
File Backups Policy . Although a full file backup system is implemented in the CSE domain, it is designed for recovery from a catastrophic crash of the system, and not for the routine recovery of files mistakenly deleted by individual users. File recovery of individual files is ONLY possible from snapshots.
All user home directories and /user/research/professor file space is stored on a Network Appliance filer with a built-in 'snapshot' feature. In each home or research directory is a .snapshot sub-directory containing read-only copies of that home or research directory. If you need to recover a file, you can do so by copying it from the appropriate snapshot. We take nightly snapshots and save them for one week, after which time they are deleted. Depending on available space, we try to keep up to 4 weekly snapshots, but there is no guarantee this will happen. Snapshot directories do not count toward your disk quota.
It is advisable to use a revision control system (such as RCS or CVS) in addition to periodic personal backups to magnetic media of important, rapidly changing items in your directories. Our systems support saving to floppy in standard MS-DOS format as well as through use of the Unix tar command. Please consult the man pages for mtools and tar for further information on how to use these tools. In addition, we have one public lab with 120Mb SuperFloppy drives, one with CD recorders, and two with 100Mb ZIP drives that can all be used to manage your personal and research files.
DO change your password regularly.
DO xlock your terminal session if you must be away briefly (10 min max).
DON'T SHARE YOUR PASSWORD with anyone (not even the sys-admins).
DON'T attempt to read other users' personal files or email.
DON'T copy any licensed software, movies, mp3s, etc. using our facilities. Doing so will result in suspension of your account and referral to the Provost.
DON'T attempt to crash or modify the operating system, or to tamper with system files or directories.
DON'T attempt to install any software on the Microsoft-based instructional PCs without authorization from the CSE managers.
DON'T attempt to install any software on the Unix system other than in your Unix home directory, or in file space specifically designated for that purpose by the systems management.
DON'T set your home directory's permissions to world or group writable.
DON'T use suspicious .rhosts entries (only entries with your MSU account name, and only entries from msu.edu hosts are permitted).
DON'T abuse the mail system (such as sending mail to all users, "spamming", etc.).
DON'T use your CSE account for personal gain (e.g. consulting, placing commercial ads on your web page, etc.).
DON'T abuse any other shared computing resources.
BE WARY of FTPed software; some software may damage your files.
BE WARY of software in /soft/lus; it is not supported, managed, or validated by the Systems Staff.
NEVER ANSWER ANY E-MAIL ASKING FOR YOUR PASSWORD. If you receive an e-mail message requesting that you e-mail your password to someone (claiming to be a sys-admin), do NOT do so. The actual sys-admins of this system never make such requests. Report any such attempt immediately.
The system managers may routinely scan our systems looking for 'bad' passwords. If yours is easily guessed, you will be notified that it must be changed immediately. Failure to do so will result in disabling of your account.
CPU-intensive or long-running jobs being run by users not on the system console must be 'niced' to level 19. Jobs that do not adhere to this policy may be killed, stopped, or reduced in priority by the systems management without warning.
Users sitting at a workstation console have priority use of the machine. Remote CPU-intensive jobs - whether niced or not - which seriously degrade console performance will be killed by the systems staff if the console user requests it.
Large jobs running on arctic or pacific may be stopped or killed if they are not niced, or if the system load gets so high that interactive performance becomes degraded.
Distributed jobs, such as rc5des contests, setiathome sessions, etc. may not be run remotely. You may only run such jobs on the computer at whose console you are sitting.
Please see the man pages for 'nice', 'renice', and 'kill' for more information.
Questions regarding our systems, software, or facilities may be directed to <manager@cse.msu.edu>. A system manager is also available to aid users during scheduled help-desk hours (in EB 3300). Requests for help can be made using the web form.