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Policies
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you have any questions or comments on these policies, you should contact
the Office of Information Technology's (OIT) NT & Unix Systems Group at
usg@utk.edu or the UNIX support line
at 974-9900 (option 4). |
Chain-Letters
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- Using OIT
computers to send chain letters is not an acceptable use of those
machines. They waste resources and interfere with the work of
others.
- First time
offenders caught sending chain letters from a OIT computer account
will have their account disabled. A trip to 200 SMC to talk with
OIT's NT & Unix Systems Group Team Leader is necessary to
have it reactivated. Repeated abuse of OIT computers by sending
chain letters will again result in a disabled account with the
matter turned over to Student Conduct. This is an annoyance to
all users and will not be tolerated.
An individual's use of OIT computers is governed by the OIT Code
of Computing Practice and Hilltopics. Item 6 of the OIT Code of
Computing Practice states:
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- To minimize
the impact of your work on the work of other persons, you
must not attempt to encroach on others' use of the facilities
or deprive them of resources.
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Page 4 Item
13 under "Standards of Conduct" in Hilltopics states
that exclusion from the University or any lesser penalty may result
from the following misconduct:
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- Disorderly
conduct or lewd, indecent, or obscene conduct on University-owned
or -controlled property or at University-sponsored or -supervised
functions.
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IRC
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As public domain
software, IRC is provided as is and unsupported, but OIT's NT &
Unix Systems Group will endeavor to provide the most current release
of the software.
- Users are
NOT to compile and run IRC server code from their accounts. IRC
servers have to be registered officially, so this would violate
a key rule of the IRC community. All servers found running will
be killed.
- Users are
to use the publicly available irc program maintained by OIT's
NT & Unix Systems Group. Private copies of IRC are
forbidden, and those found running will be killed.
- NO bots
allowed. Bots (robots, scripts written to maintain channel status
and presence) will be monitored and searched for on the OIT UNIX
machines and subsequently killed. Persistent abuse of bots may
result in revoking computing privileges.
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Jobs
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OIT's NT
& Unix Systems Group Policy on background/cpu intensive jobs.
- On the UNIX
servers, each user may run only one background, CPU, or memory
intensive process at a time.
- If OIT detects
multiple background jobs running for a given username, or if any
CPU or memory intensive job begins to seriously impact interactive
use of a machine, we may cancel, with or with prior warning, any
or all of these jobs.
- If you have
an ongoing need for what might be considered high performance
computing, you should contact OIT at USG@utk.edu
or (865) 974-6555, to explore available options.
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Passwords
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- OIT's NT & Unix
Systems Group performs checks on a regular basis to ensure that
the passwords of our users are secure and not easily guessed.
These checks are performed throughout each month, and accounts
that are found to be insecure will be revoked on the first of
each month.
- If an insecure password
is found, that account will be revoked to force the user to call
in and get a password reset. All accounts will be revoked on the
first of each month to ensure a regular policy. A revoked account
consists of the following: 1) the shell is changed to display
an appropriate message to the user. 2) a mail message is sent
out to the user informing them of the revocation. If you are a
POP mail user (Eudora, Netscape Mail, etc), you will still be
able to read your mail that your account is revoked. No mail will
be lost during the period that the account is revoked.
- OIT's NT & Unix
Systems Group uses freely available tools on the Internet to help
monitor both access to the OIT UNIX systems and the security of
users passwords.
- If your account is found
to have an insecure password and is revoked, OIT's NT & Unix
Systems Group recommends that you use the following policy to
choose your new password.
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- The best way
to ensure that a password is not easily guessed is to
make a short sentence with 7 - 10 words in it. Then
choose the first letter from each word, mixing the case
and interleaving various symbols and numbers in to form
your password.
- For example,
let us use the sentence "I do not want to go to
work". The password could be "IdnwtGtW"
or "Idnw2GtW" or even "Id!w2GtW".
This is a very simple example, but choosing your password
should be easy. Using a technique like this should be
easy for you to remember, be quite difficult for others
to guess, and would not allow hackers to crack your
password.
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RC5DES
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OIT's
NT & Unix Systems Group Policy on running the "rc5des"
program
- On
the UNIX servers it is the policy that you may not run the program
"rc5des". If OIT detects that you are running this program
that process will be terminated without warning.
If you have an questions about this policy please contact the
href="http://remedy.utk.edu/dynamic/contact.php">Helpdesk Contact Form
color="#000000">.
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SETI
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OIT's
NT & Unix Systems Group Policy on running the "SETI"
program
- On
the UNIX servers it is the policy that you may not run the program
"SETI". If OIT detects that you are running this program
that process will be terminated without warning.
If you have an questions about this policy please contact the
href="http://remedy.utk.edu/dynamic/contact.php">Helpdesk Contact Form
color="#000000">.
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rhosts
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The file $HOME/.rhosts
is a file that provides "remote authentication" for rlogin,
rsh, rcp and rcmd. This file specifies remote hosts and users that
are considered trusted. Trusted users are allowed to access the
local system WITHOUT SUPPLYING A PASSWORD using the specified account.
These files bypass the standard password-based user authentication
mechanism. To maintain system security, care must be taken in creating
and maintaining these files. Entries in these files may be of two
forms. Positive entries ALLOW access, while negative entries DENY
access. The format if each one line entry is as follows:
hostname [username]
hostname is
any host, and optionally, username is any username on the remote
host. You are able to use wildcards to allow unlimited access in
either fields by using a '+' as a wildcard. You should take care
to use '+' anywhere in a .rhosts file and never use '+ +' as this
allows ANY user from ANY host to remotely login to your account
without a password. This is both a security problem for a users
account and for the system itself.
OIT's
NT & Unix Systems Group
does not allow '+ +' to be in a user's .rhosts file, as this represents
a compromise to the user and the system itself. If we find a '+
+' in a user's .rhosts file, the UNIX group will remove the '+ +'
and alert the user to the system policy. In addition, if the account
looks to be compromised (logins from multiple domains, suspect files
in the area, etc), the account will also be revoked, and the user
will have to call the UNIX Support Line to get it activated again.
A user may have a 'hostname +' or '+ username' in their .rhosts
file but should be warned that this may lead to the account being
compromised. OIT's NT & Unix Systems Group
will monitor the logins and look for suspicious activity in these
accounts, revoking those accounts that are found to be compromised.
The UNIX group would like to discourage the use of wildcards ('+')
completely in user's .rhosts files and would encourage any user
to read the man page for rhosts (man rhosts).
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Scrtch
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OIT's
NT & Unix Systems Group
Policy on the /scrtch partition
- The
/scrtch partition on all the UNIX servers is provided for the
convenience of our customers. This space is designed to be a holding
area, a scratch workspace, where our customers may place files
on a temporary basis. Perhaps you have several meg of data on
a tape and you need to store it online temporarily - /scrtch is
available for that purpose. Perhaps you need to run a program
that will generate more data than you have space for, but you
do not need this data after the program has run - /scrtch is available
for you.
NOTE: /scrtch was not designed for long term
storage of data. For that reason, files placed in the /scrtch
partition ARE NOT BACKED UP. Also, files in /scrtch are automatically
deleted once they are 3 days old. To obtain more personal disk
space for permanent storage of data run the command 'increase-quota'.
For additional assistance please call the HelpLine at 974-9900.
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Spam
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Spamming (apologies
to the Hormel food company) is the practice of sending unsolicited,
wasteful, and annoying e-mail messages to a single user or group(s)
of users (e-mail lists). Generally, most spam is commercial junk
advertising; however, unwanted religious, racial, political, or
sexual messages are considered an act of spamming.
E-mail is a
computer resource not to be abused. Many users in the UTK computing
community use PCs and Macs to read their e-mail. Unsolicited e-mail
messages result in a loss of time downloading them and a waste of
critical disk space for each individual's machine. The former statement
also applies to OIT's computer resources.
For a good
reference to what spam is and how to fight it, check out the HTML
link:
http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/nospam.html
Here are the
policies in regards to spamming at UTK.
- Using OIT
computers for spamming purposes is an unacceptable use of those
machines. They waste resources and interfere with the work of
others.
- First time
offenders caught spamming from a OIT computer account will have
their account disabled. To reactivate the account, the offender
will have to talk with OIT's NT & Unix
Systems Group Team Leader at 200 SMC. Repeated abuse of
OIT computers by spamming will again result in a disabled account
with the matter turned over to Student Conduct. This is an annoyance
to all users and will not be tolerated.
An individual's
use of OIT computers is governed by the OIT Code of Computing Practice
and Hilltopics. Item 6 of the OIT Code of Computing Practice states:
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- To minimize
the impact of your work on the work of other persons, you
must not attempt to encroach on others' use of the facilities
or deprive them of resources.
|
Page 4 Item
13 under "Standards of Conduct" in Hilltopics states that
exclusion from the University or any lesser penalty may result from
the following misconduct:
|
- Disorderly
conduct or lewd, indecent, or obscene conduct on University-owned
or -controlled property or at University-sponsored or -supervised
functions.
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tf / MUD
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As public domain
software, tf is provided as is and unsupported, but OIT's
NT & Unix Systems Group
will endeavor to provide the most current release of the software.
- Users are
NOT to compile and run MUD server code from their accounts. All
servers found running will be killed and software deleted from
account.
- Users are
to use the publicly available tf program maintained by OIT's
NT & Unix Systems Group. Private copies of tf are forbidden,
and those found running will be killed and software deleted from
account.
- NO bots
allowed. Bots (robots, scripts written to maintain channel status
and presence) will be monitored and searched for on the OIT UNIX
machines and subsequently killed. Persistent abuse of bots may
result in revoking computing privileges.
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