Computer Science Departmental Policies
on Personal Daemons, Background Jobs, and Remote Logins

Updated: 0299

Personal Daemons

1. Recently, the use/misuse of http, msqld and those daemons that exhibit simimlar behavior has had negitive impact on the normal and customary operations of our systems. Due to the incidious nature of such daemons, all unapproved personal daemons will now be killed. Requests for approval will be honored if they are initiated by Academic Staff pursuit to course work or research. Approvals will specify machine name or machine type, as those classes or individuals not on the approval list will have their daemons killed.

Background Jobs

1. Always nice (change the the priority) of any background job. Example) nice command [command arguments] This includes programs like screen, tshost, slirp and those have have similar functionality.
2. All background jobs are forbidden on Shazam & Stimpy. (This does not refer to spawning an emacs, mosaic window or the alike.) If SSG discovers any background job on those machines, we reserve the right to KILL the process, no warning, no questions. Highest on the to-be-killed list are unattended background jobs! (Unattended background jobs are defined as jobs left running on a machine while the user is not logged into the same machine.)
3. At any time, users are ENCOURAGED to run background jobs on popeye.cs.iastate.edu and the Xmen (attended or unattended) provided they are niced.
4. SSG reserves the right to renice jobs running "un-niced" to the maximum level at any time, any machine.
5. The installation and use of any program on departmental computers that provides a service to others on the network, or prolonged connections to (or extensive use of) external network services (e.g., http daemons, connection maintaining daemons, IRC bots or those that APPEAR to act in the above manner) via departmental computers must be pre-authorized by the department.
6. Occasionaly, background jobs will monopolize a machine to point of becoming detrimental to others. On popeye, automated programs watch for situations such as these and will terminate such jobs. Users concerned about this issue should run their background jobs on the Xmen..

Remote Logins

1. In an effort to balance loads, remote logins into all deparmental machines are denied from outside the iastate.edu domain. In order to connect to the Computer Science department outside of the iastate.edu domain users are required to use an s/key password set and popeye.cs.iastate.edu (129.186.3.4) as your primary remote login machine. Once the initial connection is made, secondary connections to other departmental machines will be permitted.

2. Since popeye serves as the designated remote host and handles an extremely high volume of users, all X-based programs (xlogin, netscape, xterm, hpterm, and the alike) will be killed.

3. It is suggested that ssh or slogin be used when connecting to a secondary host within the department from popeye.