TCM
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Conduct

Whilst there is in all of us an urge to scrap all rules and wander around whistling `The Red Flag,' that urge is quite strongly suppressed in your friendly CO who believes that anarchies really don't function that well at all. Thus a few hints and tips on how to avoid provoking his (and your colleagues') wrath.

There are also some interesting legal issues. They are left until last.

Security

Security is everbody's problem, regrettably. Just as people who live in shared houses and go out leaving ground floor windows open and the front door unlocked tend to become unpopular, even if they have no valuables and don't mind squatters, so it is with computer systems. Most successful hacks start from a compromised user account, rather than a direct attack on root. Once a hacker is in, the only way of getting rid of him is to disconnect the network and reinstall the operating system on all the machines involved. This can take weeks, and will greatly inconvenience everyone.

The alternative is to live with the hacker, ignoring any random machine crashes and data corruption he might intentionally or accidently cause, and ignoring the fact that he will use our machines as a platform from which to attack other machines. This last point will ensure that the CS calls round and disconnects us anyway.

Security (from a user's point of view) is fairly simple - it involves being careful with one's account: its password, remote access to it, and X. This is discussed in more tedious detail in our security page, which is an essential read for anyone new to UNIX or unfamiliar with UNIX and networking security.

The other obvious point is report anything suspicious - if files suddenly appear in your home directory, and you can't remember putting them there, do please seek advice promptly...

Printing

Printing a hundred pages during a busy part of the day and going into town whilst it finishes, leaving someone else to sort out any printer jams and other problems, is antisocial.

If your printout fails to appear, resubmitting it half a dozen times, then going off for a coffee, is not the best solution. It is probably appearing (six-fold) on a printer you did not expect, or maybe it is temporarily delayed whilst it wanders around the network. Talk to [email protected] instead.

Big jobs

Overloading a computer so that it spends all of its time swapping to disk is inefficient, bad for the hardware, and makes interactive use of its terminal impossible. Please check that a machine has sufficient memory for the job you intend to run on it before running it. If you misjudge it, then kill the job off.

Although the above point is easy to make, judging when a computer is overloaded is slightly more difficult. Fuller hints are given in a separate page

Hogging computers is also antisocial. There are some guidelines (guideline, (n), euphemism for rule) on how not to, complete with a reminder that just because a machine is called XX.tcm.phy that does not mean that you have any entitlement to use it: it may be a personal machine.

I/O

This point is sufficiently important to deserve special emphasis. Disk I/O to a remote machine (e.g. from a machine your home directory is not physically located on to your home directory) is slow. Although the network runs at 100MBit/s so NFS might achieve 10Mb/s on a good day, the home directory server performs nightly incremental backups. It is happier if not too much has changed...

All the PCs have largish local scratch disks called `/scratch' access to which is about five times as fast as the above and produces no network traffic. However, they are scratch disks - they are not backed up. If you are writing out more than a few Mb it is probably better to use these local disks.

A half-way house is provided by /rscratch. Your quota on this is about ten times what it is for your home directory. Unlike /scratch, it is accessible equally from all computers. Like /scratch, it is not backed up.

Reconfiguring/Rebooting hardware

Unauthorised reboots, network connections / disconnections, BIOS changes, etc. are not acceptable. The buttons on your monitor are the only ones directly controlling hardware which you should ever need to press (and turning off monitors overnight is quite all right - indeed, it is recommended for those which don't have a low-power mode). UNIX computers do not need turning off at night, or, indeed, ever.

We do like to investigate and log all machine crashes, so that we can reconfigure, replace or repair as necessary. Even noisy fans interest us. [email protected]

(Just occassionally the laser printers confuse themselves. If one has been flashing its `processing' light for over half an hour without producing anything, and I am not around, feel free to power-cycle it.)

Why is it that those who most readily turn off computers without checking to see that no-one else is running directly on them, that no-one else is using any of the services that the computer is providing, and that its disks are correctly synced, are those least likely to offer to recover from the resulting mess should anything go wrong?

Reconfiguring software

Users are of course welcome to install their own private copies of software in their own filespace on any of TCM's machines as they wish. Such copies should be legal and not interfere with other people using the machine. Some care should be taken to avoid installing viruses or trojans.

Software suspected of being unlicensed may be deleted without warning - to avoid this, let me know of any licensed software you legitimately install on a TCM machine, even if it is in your own filespace.

Games

Are acceptable as long as they do not generate (significant) network traffic, do not use CPU time which would otherwise have been used for Real Work, and do not disturb others. Doom is never acceptable, chess might be! (This rule is deliberately made more liberal than that of the Computing Service, which has banned all games on all of its equipment.)

Account sharing

Don't. There are very good reasons why COs tend to become upset at the thought of people lending their passwords to others.

Daemons

Are not to be run without authorisation, particularly not those that listen for remote network connections. If you don't know what one is, you are probably not running one...

Legal restrictions

Piracy

You signed a piece of paper saying that you would not pirate the copies of commercial software available in TCM, nor would you install or use pirated software in TCM. Remember?

Recreation

Certain `games' and other activities might be covered by Janet (CS and University) rules on indecency etc. They are not acceptable.

WWW home pages

If you construct your own WWW pages, it should be clear that they do not represent the official position of TCM or the University.

More importantly, any such pages must not contain, nor contain direct links to, material which:

Nor may you host pages for most non-University organisations.

This is just a summary of the University's position, which is described at more length below (Other Rules)

To have a link to your homepage on our server, email [email protected] or see our online guide to writing WWW pages.

Data Protection Act

TCM's computers must not be used for such data without prior registration and informing the departmental Data Protection Officer. The level of security we offer against data corruption or data being read by third parties may be insufficient for certain types of personal data.

Hacking

Thou shalt not, either our computers or anyone else's from ours. If you are confused about the distinction between `hacking' and `kindly testing someone's (in)security,' do come and ask. [email protected]

Connecting your own computer to our network

This raises many issues, so is discussed separately.

Other Rules

More guidelines on the Data Protection Act, and the full IT Syndicate Rules, can be found by following a link on the IT Syndicate's page. There are also links to pages about WWW publishing and the CS's Use and Misuse of Computing Facilities document.

The ultimate penalty for misbehaving is, of course, account cancellation. Claiming that it is required for academic purposes is not a water-tight defence.

Extreme Circumstances

Naturally all rules are made to be broken, and turning off machines which are busily catching fire, or disconnecting machines which are clearly being hacked, is acceptable and indeed encouraged.


Please send comments/corrections to mjr19.