University Computing Systems

UCS Policies -- Faculty Workstations

Management
Faculty Installation of Operating System on His/Her Workstation
Installation of New Workstations
Relocation of Workstations and Peripherals
Dual Boot
Local Home Directory


Management
 Because workstations connected to a University Computing Systems (UCS) 
 subnetwork at NJIT can seriously negatively affect the entire network if 
 the workstation is mismanaged, all Unix workstations owned by faculty that 
 are on an UCS subnet are managed by UCS -- only UCS has the root 
 password. Arrangements can be made, on an as-needed basis, to provide the 
 faculty member with the ability to do certain tasks normally reserved to the 
 root user, such as adding/deleting accounts, rebooting, managing printing, etc.

 From long experience, UCS has established the policy that it does not share
 management of workstations. In the past, when someone other than UCS staff had 
 the root password to a workstation -- often a graduate student designated by
 the machine's owner -- UCS spent far too much time fixing mistakes made by
 that person which had rendered that workstation partially or totally unusable.

 All faculty Unix (Solaris, IRIX, Linux, Tru64, MacOS X) workstations managed by UCS are "AFS clients",
 meaning that all software installed in /afs is available on that workstation,
 and that a user's account on that workstation (username, password, files) are
 identical to those on all other NJIT AFS clients. Researchers using AFS 
 clients have access to large amounts (GBs) of disk space for research purposes.


Faculty Installation of Operating System on His/Her Workstation
 If a faculty member installs the operating system on his/her workstation, that
 faculty member is entirely responsible for the consequences. If AFS client
 software is not available for the operating system installed by the faculty
 member, it is not the responsibility of UCS to provide services for that
 workstation that are normally available to AFS client machines.


Installation of New Workstations
 UCS (sys@oak.njit.edu) must be given at least 3 weeks'   
 notice on requests for installation of new workstations.


Relocation of Workstations and Peripherals
 Faculty who wish to have computer equipment relocated should make
 arrangements to have that equipment moved. UCS is not responsible for moving
 equipment. 

 Relocation of equipment often involves the need to install or activate
 network ports at the new location. Faculty should arrange for this on their
 own by contacting the Computing Helpdesk at at 973.596.290 or
 help.njit.edu .

 If the equipment that is to be relocated is managed by UCS, the faculty member
 who is requesting the move should send mail to sys@oak.njit.edu prior to the
 move to request the machine be shut down properly. Once the system has been
 relocated, UCS should be contacted to bring the system online.


Dual Boot
 UCS does not support dual boot workstations, i.e., Windows and Linux on
 the same machine.  Workstations that are managed by UCS run various
 cron jobs which are used for system logging and to provide updates to 
 the operating system.  In order to ensure the integrity and security of 
 any workstation that UCS manages, it is required that the workstation 
 be available and online at all times.


Local Home Directory
 Faculty who wish to have their login directory local to their machine, i.e., not in AFS,
 may do so provided that their workstation has sufficient local disk space to accomodate such 
 a directory.  Faculty who choose to have a local login directory would be responsible for 
 making their own backups of their local directory unless their machine is currently being 
 backed up by Netbackup.  

 Note:  Workstations are not backed up unless their primary use is for computation, in which case 
 the decision to provide backup services would be made on an individual basis.