Computer Use Adviced Policy


  These are some simple reminders and regulations everyone should follow. If you have any questions or requests please email administration.

Licensed Software and Copyrighted Media
- All software/hardware of the cluster is to be used for research and educational purposes only. Please avoid storing personal files and folders in your home directory, if possible. Use the du and df commands accordingly to make sure there is enough space for everyone. You may provide weblinks to such.
- All software downloaded and used on our machines should have appropriate license. Do not download / provide copyrighted software or any kind of media (mp3's, avi's, etc) without proper permission by the copyright owner. Almost all software pre-installed except Matlab, Mathematica, CorelDraw and applications that run from the /opt directories are GPL so feel free to use them accordingly. We may purchase other software needed for research, if you request it.

Hard drive quotas and backup
- There are NO QUOTAS per user. If for some reason you need to use a large amount of hard drive space for items that do not need backup, please put them in the /scratch directory. Only the /home directory is being backed up daily.
- If you would like to restore the contents of your home directory from any day in the past week or the beginning of the current month or the beginning of the previous month, please email administration.
- You can also use the 16-speed external cd writer on legend, to backup your files.

Webpages: content and access
- Please avoid providing (through the web-server) software that will require excess bandwidth for downloading (i.e popular media or software available elsewhere and not research-oriented), and try to keep your cluster-served pages as simple as possible.
- The general suggestion for cluster webpages is to make them look like this one. This consists of cutting and pasting simple html tags. It is best to make your homepage readable by any text-based or graphic-based browser such as "lynx", "mosaic", "mozilla", "navigator", "explorer", "opera", etc. Webpages like this one should appear about the same in any graphic-based web-browser, and readable in lynx (text-based). You can email administration if you need help on using this style to write your webpage.
- Some of your webpages you may want to only provide to members of the group, or make browsable to only our cluster machines. If you want to do like that and you need help modifying your .htaccess file, please ask administration.






Last updated: 4 June 2002.