Policies on Departmental Computing Equipment

The following policies regarding management of departmental equipment have been in place for more than ten years. However, I have not found them in writing on the web, so I just wrote them here. The list is probably incomplete, so faculty and the System Administrator may wish to suggest additions. --Ted Baker

• Usage of departmental computing facilities is limited to faculty, staff, students registered in courses offered by the department, and individuals doing activities that further the mission of the department in collaboration with department faculty and staff. In the latter case, there must be a member of the faculty or staff who takes responsibility for recommending permission be granted, and for monitoring the continued need for use. Individuals who have left one of the above categories, e.g., through graduation, may have their account extended for a short time, as a courtesy,upon request to the System Administrator. Courtesy e-mail forwarding may be maintained for a longer period.
• Usage of computing facilities is further limited according to needs, by category of user. For example, see http:/www.cs.fsu.edu/academics/grad/gradload.html for rules governing graduate students who are full-time, part-time, etc.
• First priority for new equipment purchased out of State funds by the department generally will go for items that are shared by the entire department (e.g., servers, network infrastucture), shared by several courses (e.g., teaching labs), or to support core department functions (e.g., teaching assistant workstations).
• All faculty members are initially provided with one workstation, when they are hired. For faculty who have startup budgets, this comes from the startup budget.
• Faculty members are expected to fund upgrades to their workstations from grants, and possibly also from their annual departmental expense budget allotments.
• Funding maintenance and repair of grant-purchased equipment is the responsibility of the faculty member using the equipment, so long as the equipment remains under the control of the faculty member.
• Notwithstanding the above, each faculty member is entitled to one functional workstation in his/her office, adequate to read e-mail, write research papers, and log remotely into the department's servers. This entitlement may be invoked to request repair or replacement, whenever the faculty member's primary office workstation fails, regardless of the source of funds originally used to buy it. The department will decide, based on available resources, whether to repair the workstation or provide a replacement, and which replacement workstation to provide.
• Computing equipment dedicated for the use of research assistants must come from grants or faculty startup budgets. Of course, a faculty member may carry over equipment from one grant to another. The exception is when the department has unused obsolescent equipment and makes it available to faculty for research use.
• System administration support by the department's System Group is reserved for systems that are under the management of the department. In particular, if the System Group does not have exclusive root/administrator privilege on a system, they are not responsible for keeping the system up and running, and will not give the system trusted status (i.e., no NFS mounts, other than perhaps execute-only access to some shared libraries and executables) within the department's LAN. The System Group may agree to provide service to other systems if they are able to spare the time, but are under no obligation to do so.
• Systems for which individuals outside the System Group have root/administrator priviledge will generally not be trusted members of the department's local area network (grandfathered cases excepted). The System Group will attempt to accomodate such systems by various means, such as VLAN, NAT, and firewalling.
• Space in the department's server rooms in Love and MCH, which have UPS power and stronger cooling, may be provided for some grant-purchased computers, but only with advance approval by the Department Chair and System Administrator. New computers will generally be required to be able to fit into one of the department's 19" equipment racks. Permission new computers in the machine rooms will be based on:
  • the availability of space and power
  • agreement that physical access and root/administrator privilege for any new such computers will be limited to the System Group

  I hope the last two rules will be lifted for a new server room planned for the Love Building extension, since I understand that they are onerous.