From: mark@al.cs.wm.edu (Mark Raciborski)
Subject: Administration of accounts and IDs
Organization: College of William & Mary, founded 1693
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 15:42:54 GMT

We at the College of William and Mary are attempting to formulate and
develop policies, procedures, and the supporting software that will
govern or guide our administration of accounts and ids on our newly
installed RS/6000 AIX systems.

At this point we have one 550 server and twelve 220 stations in a small
lab, located at the site referenced as Jones 203, in the following
draft document.

Support of undergraduate academic computing using AIX has a potential
for great growth and we would like to formulate policies early in the
game.

The following draft is a distillation of the methodology that was used
at another academic institution where VM/CMS and VAX/VMS were the
favored platforms. It represents a major departure from the orientation
and procedures in place at William and Mary for our late, great Primos
system and, to a lessor extent, our current VM/CMS system.

If any readers of the news or distribution list would care to offer
suggestions, extend to us a summary of their experiences, or send us
locally developed documentation, it would be of great help.


Please respond directly to:

Burt Avery, College of William and Mary
Internet mail address: burt@mail.wm.edu
Bitnet mail address:   burt@wmvm1.bitnet

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                   Draft
Policies Concerning Student Instructional Accounts on AIX

The primary criteria for issuing accounts to a student who will be
using the Unix AIX systems in the public access client/server labs
is the student's need to have access to computer resources for
completion of academic work directly related to enrollment in a
course. Under terms governing the grant from IBM, only students
taking courses in Area III are eligible to use the systems currently
in Jones 203. That restriction may be lifted as more systems are
obtained under other conditions.

Upon the receipt of a request for a specific number of accounts
from instructors or faculty responsible for a course, student
accounts will be constructed by the Computer Center and
distributed to the requesting faculty member. A password for each
account will be assigned using random generation techniques. The
password will be valid only for the first login; during the first
login, the student will be required to change the password. It will
be the faculty member's responsibility to distribute the accounts
with passwords to class members and maintain records of the
account assigned to individual students.

There will be two components of the account identifier: the stem
composed of a course identifier, such as CS100, followed by a two
character, unique identifier for each course participant. The unique
component or suffix, appended to the course identifier, will be
assigned in a numerically increasing sequence beginning with 01.
All digits and alphabetic characters will be available for the suffix.
Examples of the accounts constructed include CS10001, CS10002,
CS10099, CS100AA, CS100BB, CS100ZZ, etc. The combined
account construction can have a length not exceeding eight.

The course instructor will be assigned an account in the same
fashion but the suffix will always be 00. In situations where there
are multiple instructors for a course, they can share the "00"
account, or an account with a modified course stem can be
assigned to each instructor.

The instructor's account will be assigned all rights in the home
directory of a student account in order to be able to post files,
notices, and other course material as well as check the progress of
student assignments.

Data files belonging to student accounts for courses will be purged
at the end of every semester at least one week in advance of the
following semester in order to release the accounts for the next set
of students enrolled in a course. Instructors should notify the
Computer Center that accounts for specific students are to be
preserved in order to allow the completion of class work beyond
the semester's normal end. That is, exceptions to the procedure for
purging accounts can be made for students granted Incompletes,
but the Computer Center must be notified.

Only the instructor's data files will be preserved beyond the end
of a semester. Only an instructor's account will be eligible for
archival when the course becomes inactive. Students should be
encouraged to save their files on diskettes.

Graduate students performing research that is not connected to a
specific course can be assigned a continuing account identified by
department with a comparable increasing suffix. These will be
continuing accounts that will not be purged until the assigned
owner has left the college or a department representative releases
the account.

Since all students have been assigned a personal mail account that
can be used from any public access PC lab, the student accounts
for courses will not be granted Bitnet or Internet mail privileges.
There is no outright prohibition on local mail usage between
student accounts although mail files received and filed by an
account will accumulate against disk space quotas. Local mailing
is an excellent way for an instructor to communicate with course
participants and is encouraged.
-----------------end of draft------------------------------
 
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Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix