From: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Speaker-to-Minerals)
Subject: Re: Invisibility and Stupidity Continued
Reply-To: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU
Organization: HST Wide Field/Planetary Camera
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 23:39:44 GMT

In article <11263@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu>, albert@chain.ssctr.bcm.tmc.edu (Rick Jones) writes:
>In article <92105.081218AXM113@psuvm.psu.edu> AXM113@psuvm.psu.edu (Abner Mintz) writes:
>>They have made all computer games illegal between the hours of 6pm to 1am, and
>>later in the semester they will be illegal period.  This means, if you walk
>>into an empty computer lab (say, 24 other terminals free) and start playing
>>Tetris with the sound off, as soon as they notice they will make you stop and
>>possibly put you on report (if you are a repeat offender).
>
>	Well, it's pretty harsh, but speaking as a sysadmin (Okay, who
>threw that peanut?  Try it again buster, I dare ya ;-), I do understand
>why they do that.  Without some sort of policy on games, they rapidly 
>take up both disk space and workstations, and people with real work to
>do have to try to bump some frosh with too much time on his hands
>to get their projects done on time.  I must confess that a more reasonable
>policy (the one from my alma-mater, Rice) was that nobody was allowed to
>be playing games or just reading news if there were no free seats in the
>lab.

Carl J Lydick (StM's alter ego and system manager) adds, "An even better way to
do it is to regulate use of games based on system usage, AND HAVE THE COMPUTER
ENFORCE THE REGULATIONS.  You have a single detached process monitor the
computer usage (number of free terminals, free CPU time, I/O rates, etc.).  If
usage of any resource exceeds one threshold value, disable games.  If it
exceeds a higher value, give the game players some warning, then if they're
STILL playing games 5 minutes later, FORCE them to exit from the game (without
saving, for games that allow the player to save the status of the game).  Of
course, this requires that the computer be able to distinguish between games
and non-games.  You can set up a policy whereby all games supported by the
system administrator reside in a certain directory tree, and require that users
put games that they put on the system themselves in an easily distinguishable
subdirectory of their login directory.  If any user is found to violate this
policy more than, say, twice, tell the monitoring process to assume that if the
individual in question is logged in at all, he's playing a game and log him
out."

>>They have just reduced the time articles remain on netnews from 7 days to 3
>>days (which is why I have been missing articles ... I was reading netnews
>>every few days, and this allowed some to expire before I read them), which was
>>easy to do without reconfiguring the system.
>
>	Well, I'll betcha they're running out of disk space.  News takes up,
>hmm, let me check, 452 meg right now on our news server, and it'll probably
>fill up to the full 950 meg on the disk by the end of the week.  If disk
>space were free, they'd probably let news hang around forever.

"True.  You can have access to lots of newsgroups, or you can have a long
expiration period for news articles.  If you want both, it's up to YOU to buy
the disk to hold all the stuff."

>	Hey, hug a sysadmin today.  They can always use a couple.

"I second that."