Xref: utzoo news.admin:8299 news.misc:4270 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!tale From: tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.misc Subject: Re: Do you restrict your users? Message-ID: <$!92!%@rpi.edu> Date: 13 Feb 90 01:35:35 GMT References: <90042.134648LRL@PSUVM.BITNET> <90043.092940LRL@PSUVM.BITNET Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY Lines: 66 In <90043.092940LRL@PSUVM.BITNET Linda Littleton writes: People answered the expected stuff of warning the user, then taking away their privileges, etc. What I'd like to know is: I'd be hard pressed to recommend revocation of privilege for first or even second offenders. It really doesn't matter how I feel about it though because Rensselaer has a rather complete Campus Computer Use Policy which outlines what is not considered acceptable behaviour. I don't think it gets put into play much but mention of it and the consequences is usually enough to calm someone down. I saw a recent message that one of the people who recently reposted one of the pyramid schemes got his account yanked. Without knowing anything else about the user and his environment my gut reaction is that this was wrong; he could likely have posted it out of sincere naivety, not realising that it was really a wrong thing to do. 2a. Who issues the warnings and deals the user's appeals? Does this generally befall the news administrator? "Not my job." I think this varies a lot though because of the different capacities people can serve in. When I started as news admin for Rensselaer I was an assistant systems programmer for the campus public access workstations. Now I am a software engineer for the Computer Science department and a part-timer for the FSF. While some of my responsibilities do step into the domain of system administration, and I have been given root privileges on many machines to facilitate this, I am not really a system administrator. Most user problems aren't my problems; I don't worry about accounts and dumps and restores and screwed up home directories and how much diskspace people are using and so on and so forth. The network around here then is not only the machines but also the admins. If there is some sort of problem coming out of domain.rpi.edu it isn't my job to put the user on disciplinary action. What I will have to do is talk with both the user and his system administrator and get it all straightened out. 2b. Do you wait for users to call bad stuff to your attention, or does someone go looking for it? If someone goes looking for it around here he's on his own little vendetta. No one here is commissioned to be the Mary Whitehouse(*) of Rensselaer. I should clarify that it way a high level professor who rot13'd the message and then complained to my boss's boss's boss, who told me to cancel the article. I did (just from our local system) and am wondering how others would have handled this. I almost certainly wouldn't have cancelled it except under direct threat from my superiors. My immediate superior tends to site with me on most issues regarding freedom/restriction though so I'm not too extremely concerned that I'm often treading on his toes. Cancelling it from your own system is technically fine though. You didn't send out any search-and-destroy missiles all over the net and no one else can really tell you what must exist on your machine. Dave (*) Benefits of C News #102 -- expands cultural and political horizons through knowledge of the source code. -- (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet")) "Nice plant. Looks like a table cloth."