Comment AUPs and admins (was Re:WPI's Residential AUP) (Score 1) 51
>>AEJ is already pissed off at the entire world.
>I second that one. Tactful, he ain't.
I'll take the opportunity to also be non-tactful and say: Suck it down, boy. aej's been the head honcho of the Unix systems on campus for longer than most Slashdotters have been alive. He's been around long enough to have seen *all* the shit that students past and present have available to pull, and pulled no small amount of it himself back in his student days. He knows what you've done, 'cause you're not the first, and you damn well won't be the last. There's little, if any, place for tact in the face of that. Hell, the word I hear is that he's actually somewhat mellowed these days, compared to past decades.
I was a student at WPI for three years. Dropped out and got a job for a couple of years. Left that and started as a Unix sysadmin at WPI CCC at the beginning of this past August. The first time I ever met aej was for my job interview, 'cause I'd already been sufficiently informed of what an unholy terror it was to have to face aej for being naughty with the systems that I worked to keep out of his crosshairs. Even after working for the man for 7 months, I still fear him a bit occasionally.
Here are a few things that need to be considered, and thanks to gmonkey and Roxton for pointing some of this out already. The base AUP is sort of a reflection of the fact that this is not only academia, but an engineering/tech college to boot. Basically, we in the Unix admin group work to make sure that as many folks as possible are able to get their work and other studies done. We can typically be fairly accommodating, as long as you're not doing something that deprives other students of the ability to get their own stuff done and as long as you're not otherwise doing something stupid that drops a load of cops and/or lawyers on your (and possibly our) head.
Keep crashing the system, and we'll want to have a chat with you. Same if you're shelling out MP3z or Photoshop or something out of your Web server space. Do we actively scan for this shit? No, don't be silly. But if it's in the top 10 Web bandwidth usage for the day, or someone informs us of something, or whatever that it's brought to our notice, then we'll do something about it. Typically, we suspend the account, so the student has to come to us and discuss the issue before he/she gets it back. While I can't speak much to the Residential AUP and NetOps' vaunted and rumored unilateral ass-booting capabilities (no, I don't know if they have the uber-expel power someone else here mentioned), I can say that for the most part, we don't keep a student's account suspended once they've talked with us, unless it's something sufficiently egregious that it probably merits expulsion or the like anyway. But we can't just expel someone out of hand; we take them to Campus Hearing Board, which typically means it's not just an AUP violation, but most likely a violation of school policy, and probably breaking the law as well. NetOps' supposed power of expulsion is likely that they're extra-likely to go to the Board, and will be more likely to get their way.
But ultimately, there are appeals processes and checks to keep us from truly going over the BOFHly edge. If we attempted to go above that as Mr. Kadie raises the bogeyman of us doing, we would probably very quickly be some very unemployed sysadmins.
We have a lot more to deal with in our day than cleaning up after naughty students, faculty, and staff on our systems and networks, or to snoop on their activities. We work to bring up other services, and to keep the ones in place running and up to date. Our AUP, as currently written, is meant to show that we trust the WPI community to at least some degree to be reasonable about what they do, and not to set down too much about what is and is not OK, 'cause you can never catch all of that, especially in a community that can itself devise the most interesting things on its own, and it's better to take each thing as it comes and handle it accordingly. It's an attempt to balance freedom with keeping things reasonable.
We're not going to turn into crazed account-deleting maniacs. The other possibility for a change in how the CCC cracks down on the populace would involve a complete change in who's here, and in that case, you've bigger problems, like losing a man with decades of experience. A more solid policy means squat, as with reasonable personnel involved in utilizing it, it's not needed, and with unreasonable personnel, they'll ignore it until they get fired for it. The AUP does not require aej or any of us to be tactful in telling you to stop IRCing from the dialups or whatever, and I don't see that they ever should.
Chris "Slarti" Pinard
UNIX Systems Administrator, WPI CCC
--
Chris Pinard: Just zis guy, ya know?
Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?
>I second that one. Tactful, he ain't.
I'll take the opportunity to also be non-tactful and say: Suck it down, boy. aej's been the head honcho of the Unix systems on campus for longer than most Slashdotters have been alive. He's been around long enough to have seen *all* the shit that students past and present have available to pull, and pulled no small amount of it himself back in his student days. He knows what you've done, 'cause you're not the first, and you damn well won't be the last. There's little, if any, place for tact in the face of that. Hell, the word I hear is that he's actually somewhat mellowed these days, compared to past decades.
I was a student at WPI for three years. Dropped out and got a job for a couple of years. Left that and started as a Unix sysadmin at WPI CCC at the beginning of this past August. The first time I ever met aej was for my job interview, 'cause I'd already been sufficiently informed of what an unholy terror it was to have to face aej for being naughty with the systems that I worked to keep out of his crosshairs. Even after working for the man for 7 months, I still fear him a bit occasionally.
Here are a few things that need to be considered, and thanks to gmonkey and Roxton for pointing some of this out already. The base AUP is sort of a reflection of the fact that this is not only academia, but an engineering/tech college to boot. Basically, we in the Unix admin group work to make sure that as many folks as possible are able to get their work and other studies done. We can typically be fairly accommodating, as long as you're not doing something that deprives other students of the ability to get their own stuff done and as long as you're not otherwise doing something stupid that drops a load of cops and/or lawyers on your (and possibly our) head.
Keep crashing the system, and we'll want to have a chat with you. Same if you're shelling out MP3z or Photoshop or something out of your Web server space. Do we actively scan for this shit? No, don't be silly. But if it's in the top 10 Web bandwidth usage for the day, or someone informs us of something, or whatever that it's brought to our notice, then we'll do something about it. Typically, we suspend the account, so the student has to come to us and discuss the issue before he/she gets it back. While I can't speak much to the Residential AUP and NetOps' vaunted and rumored unilateral ass-booting capabilities (no, I don't know if they have the uber-expel power someone else here mentioned), I can say that for the most part, we don't keep a student's account suspended once they've talked with us, unless it's something sufficiently egregious that it probably merits expulsion or the like anyway. But we can't just expel someone out of hand; we take them to Campus Hearing Board, which typically means it's not just an AUP violation, but most likely a violation of school policy, and probably breaking the law as well. NetOps' supposed power of expulsion is likely that they're extra-likely to go to the Board, and will be more likely to get their way.
But ultimately, there are appeals processes and checks to keep us from truly going over the BOFHly edge. If we attempted to go above that as Mr. Kadie raises the bogeyman of us doing, we would probably very quickly be some very unemployed sysadmins.
We have a lot more to deal with in our day than cleaning up after naughty students, faculty, and staff on our systems and networks, or to snoop on their activities. We work to bring up other services, and to keep the ones in place running and up to date. Our AUP, as currently written, is meant to show that we trust the WPI community to at least some degree to be reasonable about what they do, and not to set down too much about what is and is not OK, 'cause you can never catch all of that, especially in a community that can itself devise the most interesting things on its own, and it's better to take each thing as it comes and handle it accordingly. It's an attempt to balance freedom with keeping things reasonable.
We're not going to turn into crazed account-deleting maniacs. The other possibility for a change in how the CCC cracks down on the populace would involve a complete change in who's here, and in that case, you've bigger problems, like losing a man with decades of experience. A more solid policy means squat, as with reasonable personnel involved in utilizing it, it's not needed, and with unreasonable personnel, they'll ignore it until they get fired for it. The AUP does not require aej or any of us to be tactful in telling you to stop IRCing from the dialups or whatever, and I don't see that they ever should.
Chris "Slarti" Pinard
UNIX Systems Administrator, WPI CCC
--
Chris Pinard: Just zis guy, ya know?
Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?
