CSE/CSAR maintains a number of Sun servers and clients for use by CSAR staff as well as CSE students and faculty. These machines all share logins, so that a user may log in on any of the clients and will be able to access his or her home directory and run any software installed on the servers.
These accounts are subject to a number of usage policies, and users should be aware of these; violations may result in termination of the user's account or more serious penalties. These policies, as well as additional information to help users make the best use of these accounts, are listed below.
Note that this page refers only to the CSE/CSAR Suns. If you have questions about the CSE/CSAR Turing cluster, please see http://www.cse.uiuc.edu/turing or send mail to manager@turing.cse.uiuc.edu.
CSE/CSAR accounts are available to CSE/CSAR students, staff, and faculty, pending approval of the CSE/CSAR administration. All CSE/CSAR accounts are bound by UIUC's Policy on Appropriate Use of Computers and Network Systems. Violation of this campus-wide policy is grounds for account termination and/or possible legal action. The most pertinent parts of this policy include:
Users should not share passwords with spouses, coworkers, friends, or anyone else. Remember that action taken with your account is assumed to be taken by you unless it can be proven otherwise — do not let someone else use your account. Do not leave your passwords lying out in the open or in a plain text file on your computer. You should change your password regularly (once every 6 months is a good guideline) and make sure it is not a dictionary word, your birthday, or other easily-cracked string.
CSE/CSAR accounts are to be used for CSE/CSAR activities only. Please refrain from using your CSE/CSAR account for personal email or file storage; disk space is an especially limited resource. Users who consume a large amount of storage with personal files may have their accounts terminated.
At any time, the CIO's Security office or the CSE/CSAR system administrators may take immediate action to lock down systems or accounts to found to be involved in a security incident. If this happens, it is likely no warning will be given prior to the action; however, we will make every attempt to notify the user as soon as possible afterwards.
Because some CSE/CSAR users need large amounts of disk space for legitimate reasons on a temporary or permanent basis, quotas have not been imposed on accounts on the CSE/CSAR machines. This does not mean users are free to use as much space as they would like, however, as we have only so much disk space. Thus, users must monitor their disk usage, which can be done very easily by running the following command:
% /usr/bin/du -sk ~
The output of this command will be the number of kilobytes currently being used by your home directory. For CSAR users, home directories should be kept below 5 GB, and CSE students should limit their home directories to 1 GB or less. Even if you are below these limits, however, you should practice good housekeeping to make sure you are not taking up more space than is necessary.
If you are taking up too much space — especially if you notice (or you are informed by the system administrator) that disk space on your home directory partition is running low, there are a number of things you can do to help, such as:
While most of the CSE/CSAR Suns are desktop clients that are virtually identical in terms of usage, a few machines are of special significance:
Copernicus is the “main” CSE/CSAR user machine and the only CSE/CSAR Sun client that is open via ssh to the Internet at large. If you wish to use the CSE/CSAR Suns from home or elsewhere on campus, you will need to ssh through copernicus first. Copernicus usually has sufficient capacity to run small jobs.
Newton and raphson are designated computational machines. Users should refrain from using these machines unless running relatively large or long compute jobs. Please do not use these machines for reading your email or performing tasks better done on copernicus or on a desktop client.
Picard is the student server for CSE classes. Accounts for classes such as CS420 are valid on this server only; other CSE/CSAR users should avoid using this server during the spring semester, when these classes are in session — non-student jobs may be terminated at any time if the system administrator determines they are inhibiting students from doing their work. Picard is open to UIUCnet only via ssh; students should come in through VPN or another machine on the UIUC network.
Galileo is the CSE/CSAR file server and mail server; all user home directories and group projects directories are mounted from galileo. Users are not allowed to use galileo to run any jobs whatsoever. Anyone found idling or running software on galileo will have their job terminated.
Kepler is the CSE/CSAR web server and ftp server. Like galileo, users may not use it to run jobs; in fact, access is even more restricted to this machine than other clients. If you wish to edit web pages or add items to the ftp server, you may do this by using the /servers partition mounted on all the CSE/CSAR clients.
Periodically, the installation of patches or other software upgrades requires downtime on the CSE/CSAR machines. During these times, processes may be killed or the machines rebooted. It is important that users be aware when these maintenance hours are scheduled in order to time the submission of long computation jobs to avoid disruptions. System administrators cannot be held responsible if jobs fail because machines are receiving regular scheduled maintenance.
Regular maintenance times are as follows:
Scheduled maintenance hours for these four machines is 0530 to 0730 on the third Tuesday of each month.
Scheduled maintenance hours for these two machines is 0530 to 0730 on the fourth Tuesday of each month.
All other clients have regular maintenance hours of 0800 to 1200 on every Saturday and Sunday. Generally, this will apply to any given client only once per month — for instance, if your desktop is patched and rebooted the first week of May, it is extremely unlikely the system will be disrupted again until June. If users have a particular preference for when their machine is patched, please notify the system administrators.
If necessary, maintenance may be scheduled outside these hours — to apply a critical security patch, for instance. We will try to notify users as far in advance of these times as possible, but due to the importance of security patches, we may not be able to do so every time.
If you have a long compute job, we suggest running it on newton or raphson beginning as soon after galileo's patch time as possible; while you may be able to run the job starting after newton or raphson's patch time, when galileo is rebooted, the NFS filesystem you run the job from may be disrupted, which could cause a problem with your job. If you have a job that may possibly straddle a scheduled patch time, please notify the system administrators prior to beginning the job, and we will try to accommodate you.
Likewise, if you plan to be working on a certain weekend and would like to avoid having your machine patched and rebooted in the middle of your work, please let us know, and we'll arrange a better time to patch your machine. All machines will be patched and rebooted at least once a month in order to make sure the OS is up to date, barring extraordinary circumstances.