Department of Computer Science and Engineering Computing Policies

Introduction

This chapter describes all policies governing the use and administration of the computer facilities within the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at The Ohio State University. These policies reflect the current official positions of the Department. The Department's Computer Committee is responsible for making all policy decisions related to CSE Computing Services (CS).

Because technology and roles change, specific information about the computing facility and the individuals involved is contained in the departments Web pages.

General Principles

The department's computer facilities are limited and we have a relatively large user population. We rely on our users to recognize this and to be considerate of other users. This document describes both general guidelines and specific rules and is designed to help users make mature and rational decisions in regard to their use of CSE facilities.

The following principles guide these policies:

Academic Integrity
As an institution of higher learning, CSE must maintain the integrity of all activities related to this important purpose. Electronic acts that threaten this integrity will be handled in accordance with OSU policies related to Academic Misconduct.
Reasonable Use
All use of CS resources by users is expected to be reasonable in the sense that one users use of the environment does not impact others' use. Commercial use of the CSE computing environment, using excessive amounts of CPU time, using excessive amounts of disk space, and generating excessive amounts of network traffic are all examples of unreasonable use.
Fair Allocation of Resources
The Department will establish guidelines for allocating computing resources to ensure fair and equitable access by all users.
Social Responsibility
The CS strives to provide to the CSE community computing facilities that are both safe and professional. Moreover, because the CS computer network is part of a larger international network, the Department assumes certain responsibilities as a member of a growing electronic community. This has consequences both in terms of the services the Department provides as well as in terms of the types of security measures the Department will implement to ensure we meet these responsibilities.
Right to Privacy
Computer files are a form of property separable from the media on which they are recorded. The contents of a file will be treated as analogous to physical property. The computer files of an account may not be inspected, copied, changed, or otherwise altered unless access is provided by the owner. The only exceptions made will be for purposes relevant to the administration of the computer system or to investigate misuse.

Requesting Policy Changes

The CS, CSE Computer Committee, and CSE Chair all have a role in the management of CSE facilities. The CS is responsible for day-to-day operation of the facilities and will frequently be the source of recommendations for new projects and changes to the facilities. The Computer Committee is responsible for policies governing the use of the facilities, and for recommending to the faculty and/or the Chair significant changes affecting the CS. The Computer Committee also is responsible for prioritizing projects having major impact on resources. The CSE Chair is responsible overall for departmental resources, both personnel and financial.

Handling Violations

A user who violates CSE policies should be aware that such transgressions will be taken very seriously.

Privacy violations may result in criminal prosecution if appropriate.

Violating reasonable use of computer resources may result in permanent termination of the user's account.

For violations related to academic integrity, academic misconduct proceedings are a typical recourse.

Violations can also result in termination of employment and denial of future employment by the Department. This policy pertains to staff as well as to students and faculty. Staff are expected to access only such information as is necessary for the performance of their job, and to inspect that information only to the degree necessary for carrying out activities related to their job description. When a possible violation has been detected, the evidence will be taken to the Chair of the Computer Committee or the Chair of the Department.

Definitions

Facilities

The Departmental computer facilities are defined as the laboratories, computer hardware, and computer software obtained by the Department for general use. This includes (but is not limited to) the labs, computers, workstations, terminals, printers, disks, network communication hardware, and all software that runs on the hardware.

It does not include hardware and software obtained by the faculty for research purposes.

Users

Different types of users have different usage limits as well as different access rights. The Department tries to be flexible enough to accommodate individual needs.

The Department has defined the following classes of users:

Faculty
Tenure-track faculty and instructors.
Staff
Full-time and part-time employees of the Department who are neither faculty nor students.
Graduate Students
Active CSE graduate students who are officially in the Department. There are two types:
Supported Graduate Students
Students who receive support from the CSE Department including fellows, graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), graduate research assistance (GRAs), and graduate administrative assistants (GAAs). GRAs are supported by faculty researchers while fellows, GTAs, and GAAs are supported by the department.
Unsupported Graduate Students
Graduate students who do not receive support from the CSE Department but who may or may not be receiving support from other sources within the University or from outside agencies.
Undergraduate CSE Majors
Undergraduate students who have been officially admitted to the CSE Department as majors. They may be in the College of Engineering, the College of Arts and Sciences, or the Business College.
Non-CSE students
CSE pre-majors, non-CSE Undergraduates and non-CSE graduate students who are currently taking CSE courses.
Special Users
These may include research collaborators, students in non-credit seminars or other special users requested by the faculty or staff. The creation of accounts for special users, and their specific configuration of resources, must be approved by the Computer Committee.

Further, the computer fee has established the following additional class:

Fee-payers
All users of the CSE computing network who pay the computing fee. This category consists of all CSE Graduate Students, all Undergraduate CSE majors and anyone who voluntarily pays the fee.

Accounts

The types of accounts are:

Permanent Accounts
These accounts are given to individuals for as long as they are affiliated with the Department. Fee payer student accounts will be deleted during finals week of the quarter following the quarter the user graduates or after 2 quarters where they did not take CSE courses/pay the computing fee. Other permanent accounts will be deleted two weeks following the user's termination date. The Department may maintain email forwarding services by request to the latter for three months.

Types of users: faculty, staff, CSE graduate students, and undergraduate CSE majors.

Class accounts
These accounts are given only for a specific CSE course and last for only one quarter. Accounts for non-CSE majors are deleted the Tuesday following finals week of the quarter in which the class if offered.

Types of users: Students enrolled in CSE courses who are neither CSE Majors nor CSE Graduate Students.

Event Accounts
These accounts are created for specific events such as seminars and as such have a definite life span. The technical requirements for the accounts must be provided by the organizer and approved by the Computer Committee.
Guest Accounts
Faculty may request accounts for individuals not affiliated with the department or with OSU. Such accounts must be approved by the Computer Committee and may be renewed indefinitely

Appropriate User

Account Use

Computing accounts are to be used for class work or research directly related to the reason the individual was given the account. Other use of an account, such as experimenting with non-instructional software, is allowed only when such use does not impact the ability of others to get their work done or otherwise significantly impact the availability of Department resources.

For both the UNIX and Microsoft Windows environment we have defined servers for use by faculty and by students. Faculty servers are to be used only by faculty and staff. Faculty can log into student servers to help students with assignments, etc. However, the two environments are identical and there should be no need to access a specific server or class of servers for any particular functionality.

Compute servers are provided for users who wish to run compute-intensive applications. Such programs consume large amounts of CPU or memory and may run for a long time. Because jobs on the compute server may consume resources unnecessarily, by executing an in an infinite loop for example, CS staff will monitor these jobs and stop them if they appear to be out of control. If users need to run a compute-intensive program that may exhibit suspect behavior, they should contact the CS staff by sending email to help@cse.ohio-state.edu prior to running the job to explain their needs and perhaps explicitly schedule the job to lessen its impact on other users.

Login servers should be accessed through the appropriate alias. The aliases may direct you to a group of machines providing that service. We use aliases to allow us to reconfigure our environment as needed to compensate for system outages or to adjust for demand. There is no commitment that a specific machine will be available.

A CSE computer account is to be used by the individual assigned to it and by no one else. A violation of this principle may be considered academic misconduct and will be handled accordingly. This policy is rigid because any suspect computing activity that may threaten system security or otherwise violate policy is traced to a particular account and the owner of that account is held entirely responsible for that activity.

In general, violators of any usage policy may be ejected from the system by lab operators or other CS staff and any jobs they are running may be stopped.

Disk Space

Disk space is intended for department-related activities. Disk quotas are established for all users. The departmental web pages contain specific information on categories of users and their respective quotas. Commands are available to check quotas and current disk usage. Users will receive a warning when they are approaching the limits of their quota. The following practices help to keep usage below quota:

Printing Guidelines

The CSE printing facilities are intended to be used for department-related printing. Print quotas are defined for all student and guest accounts. Information about print quotas is available on the CSE web pages.

The following guidelines are designed to prevent unintentional abuse of printing privileges. Repeated use of the printing facilities in violation of these guidelines is considered abuse and subject to disciplinary measures.

Faculty and Instructors Printing

CSE course instructors are reminded that the CSE printers should not be used as reproduction devices, i.e., copy machines. The printing of large jobs has a negative impact on the computing environment because it monopolizes the printers, preventing other users from accessing them.

Any course material that would normally be reproduced in hardcopy for each student should be processed through sources available for such reproduction. Using Cop-Ez for course notes, or photocopying and distributing handouts of more than a few pages are two options.

Instructors wishing to make course materials available on their web site are asked to break the material up so that students can print out only what they need.

Network Facilities

Network facilities provide users with a means to share email, news, programs and other files within and outside of the CSE computing environment.

Users are expected to read electronic mail and news and, in particular to monitor the cse.general and cse.cs.announce newsgroups. Important information such as computer downtime and changes to various departmental procedures are announced on these newsgroups.

Users are expected to be reasonable and polite in their use of network facilities and to know and follow both the mail and news etiquette guidelines. They also become familiar with the rules of the organizations that operate the computer networks to which CSE provides access. If any CSE resource is used as part of a violation of policy governing computing resources available by way of the network, it is considered abuse of CSE privileges.

The following are specific guidelines for network use:

Computing Services(CS) Labs

The primary purpose of the CS labs is to serve the educational process. Thus, users are expected to conduct themselves in a mature and professional fashion in all CS laboratories. Loud or rowdy behavior is not permitted. Users who persist in such behavior will be considered in violation of Department policies.

Screen locking programs are provided so users can lock their terminals or workstations when they have to leave them for a short time. Terminals and workstations should be locked for no more than 15 minutes. The Computing Services staff will log users out of machines which have been locked for more than 15 minutes.

If a public-use machine is locked for longer than 15 minutes, users may ask a lab consultant to unlock the machine or call the Help Desk (2-6542) so that the screen lock can be killed, the user logged out, and email sent to the offending user explaining the policy.

Computers in public labs and offices are the property of the University and are part of the workplace. Images displayed on them should be governed by principles related to appropriate use and to maintaining a supportive, friendly work environment. Images may be displayed if they meet the above guidelines and can be stored within the user's disk quota. Any user who finds the display of a particular bitmap inappropriate should notify the operations staff.

Broadcasting audio to other lab machines or playing audio so loud that it bothers other users is prohibited. Normally, users should use headphones when listening to audio in CSE labs so as not to disturb others.

Our environment is design to allow users to work remotely in much the same way they do in the computer labs. All of the policies in this document apply equally to local and remote usage. Interfaces are provided for remote use including: mail, news, ftp, etc. However, the CS does not support user owned equipment. See the section on Requesting Services and Limitations to Support for further information.

Windows Accounts

General Microsoft Windows access is provided using a shared Microsoft Windows environment. This environment is often referred to as the ``Microsoft Windows servers''. In this environment, multiple users use a PC to access a central Windows server that allows a limited number of users to ``time share'' the system. Due to the nature of this environment, users are required to obey the following policies:

World Wide Web

The department provides the ability of any user to create their own WWW pages. The CS reserves the right to remove users' material from the WWW for the following reasons:

Security Violations

On occasion, people have tried to break into the department's system. When such security violations are discovered, the CSE staff will do whatever is necessary to resolve the breach. This might include locking an account that has been compromised.

Users found to be violating or attempting to violate system security may face academic misconduct charges or legal action. Using the department's systems to attempt to violate the security of any other system will result in similar consequences.

Users who believe there may be a security breach should bring their concerns to the systems staff immediately. Users should not, under any circumstances, attempt to find a security hole in the system without permission from the systems staff. The systems staff will treat any attempt to violate security as hostile.

Support Services

Effective operation of our computing facilities requires that the entire community be tolerant and exercise good judgment when seeking services. The CS supports more than 3,000 students, faculty and staff. It is important that requests for services do not define solutions prematurely and instead allow for full exploration of all possible solutions by the servicer. The following guidelines are designed to help the entire community better understand how to obtain different services from the CS, what to expect when such services are requested, and what recourse is available when dissatisfied.

Much of the discussion in this section relies on a distinction between software that is officially supported by the CS and software that is not officially supported. The CS maintains on its web site a list of fully supported software. In general, official support includes:

There are four types of requests: seeking advice, problem reports, requests for new or modified services, and complaints. Each of these is elaborated below.

Seek Advice

This type of request includes questions on hardware or software not officially supported by the CS. It may involve software or systems running on home computers, systems that users have configured and control themselves, software that users are trying to run in their own account, etc.

Clearly, any computer support staff cannot be knowledgeable about every piece of hardware and software available to users. Further, even knowledgeable staff may have difficulty offering help when users have modified their own systems in ways known only to them.

Although the staff is willing to offer advice in these circumstances, other resources exist that may be better suited to address the problem, or to offer additional advice and support. Examples of these resources include man pages, Frequently Asked Questions lists (FAQs), newsgroups, and WWW services. Man pages are online documentation available for most UNIX commands and CSE software packages. There are some man pages that can only be accessed if you have subscribed to the software package via the subscribe command. FAQs and newsgroups can be found internal and external to the CSE Department.

The CSE WWW site provides online resources including those specific to the CSE Department and CS. There are also many other web sites that provide help and documentation on a wide variety of topics.

Problems Reports

This type of request involves software and hardware officially supported by the CS. Example problems are the unavailability of some system, a printer not printing, a supported software anomaly, and a problem with a CSE account. The objective is to get the problem fixed, and if appropriate, identify an interim workaround.

The help request system is to be used for problem reports. Users should provide as much detail as possible when reporting a problem, i.e., the time the problem occurred, the system the user is logged into, the command being executed, an error message received, etc. The more information that is provided in the problem description, the more quickly the problem can be pinpointed and resolved.

An example help request that is too vague is ``I can't finger anyone anymore.'' A better request would be:

Neither ff or finger seems to be working on beta. Both return with no
information:

/n/gold/2/smith 
% ff smith
/n/gold/2/smith
% finger smith
/n/gold/2/smith

A help request will be reviewed and the user will receive a response within six business hours. The initial response may be a request for more information or a status report. A help request that cannot be handled immediately may be assigned to CS staff.

Lab consultants are available in the instructional labs to help users use the environment. They cannot answer course specific questions. They can provide help with getting logged in, working with the system and general questions about software.

Changes in CS Service

This type of request concerns changing the configuration of the computing environment itself, for example, requesting the installation of new software, new systems, changes to labs, etc. The objective is to obtain approval for the new service and to make the new service available to the community.

To most efficiently use our resources it is also important that support be discontinued for services whose use has declined or that have become obsolete. The CS staff or other users may recommend to the committee that services or functionality be removed from the environment.

Change Approval Process

The CSE Computer Committee is responsible for recommending to the Department significant changes to the CS facilities. Students, faculty, and CS staff all are represented on this committee. Proposals for changes should be submitted to the Chair of the committee. Normally, the committee considers and prioritizes in Winter Quarter changes that will take effect for the following academic year, i.e., beginning Autumn Quarter of the same year.

With over 3,000 users and limits to staff and budget resources it is important that the committee look at the total costs and benefits of any proposal. While a formal process will be followed in committee for final approval of any changes, it is strongly recommended that users who want to propose changes discuss their needs with the CS staff before making a formal proposal. This allows the requester and the staff to evaluate a range of possible solutions that may be acceptable.

Proposals must include information concerning:

The CS staff will review the proposal and report to the committee on issues including:

Changes to Supported Software

Proposed changes to the list of officially supported software are also considered as part of this process.

While it is best to propose software changes as part of the annual planning process there are two aspects that might be considered during the year. Course-related software change requests made during the year must be made at least one quarter prior to the quarter the software will be required. Even if the proposal is approved, this lead time does not guarantee that the software will be available in time. The size and complexity of the package and the other priorities of the staff may prohibit the project's completion in one quarter.

The CS staff will perform all software upgrades during quarter breaks. The Computer Committee will be informed of proposed upgrades for the coming break by the 8th week of the quarter. This lead time will allow users who may be adversely impacted by the upgrade of a specific package to ask that it be delayed.

Complaints

Dissatisfaction with services should be handled professionally, courteously and promptly by all concerned. Complaints should be registered through the help request system. A user may appeal the response to a complaint to the Director of Computing Services. If the problem involves a disagreement about policies, it may be appropriate to bring this disagreement to the CSE Computer Committee for resolution.

Research Computing Agreement

The following is an agreement for providing funding, tasking, and staff to support research computing.

Funding Support

Funding is supported with a two-tier system of:

Tasking

Minimal: The Minimal service fee allows access to the research computing staff for assistance with research related computing needs. The research staff person will coordinate with the researchers and appropriate staff members to complete tasks. For those researchers who have purchased computers with their research dollars, the level assumes that a researcher is leasing a network connection (IP address) for each machine for $30/month to cover CS network hardware, software maintenance and upgrades.

Variable-Price: The set of tasks included here are those that the CS staff, in consultation with the Computing Research Subcommittee, consider beyond the minimal support. They might include services like upgrade of a non-CS application on a server, backup/restore for a non-CS configured server, provision of alternate network protocols, and so on. These would be performed on a time and material basis at $33 per hour.

Support Requests

All requests for research support should be registered through the electronic help request system to the CS Research Support staff. This process allows for explicit identification of those requests that relate to research needs. The Research Support staff will coordinate with researchers as well as other CS staff in processing requests. They will also prioritize requests based on severity, age, and available resources, if necessary in consultation with the Director of CS and the Computing Research Subcommittee.

Summary of Official CSE Policies

Policies governing the CSE computing environment are summarized below. Violation of these policies can lead to various penalties spanning loss of account privileges to criminal prosecution.