Unix-Based Faculty Workstations
Unix-Based Faculty Workstations
Management
Faculty Installation of Operating System on His/Her Workstation
Installation of New Workstations
Relocation of Workstations and Peripherals
Dual Boot
Local Home Directory
Backups of Local Data
Management
Because workstations connected to the NJIT network can seriously negatively affect the entire network if the workstation is mismanaged, for Unix workstations owned by faculty and managed by ARCS, only ARCS has the root password. Arrangements can be made, on an as-needed basis, to provide the faculty member with the ability to do certain tasks normally reserved to the root user, such as adding/deleting accounts, rebooting, managing printing, installing software locally, etc.
From long experience, ARCS has established the policy that it does not share management of workstations. In the past, when someone other than ARCS staff had the root password to a workstation -- often a graduate student designated by the machine's owner -- ARCS spent far too much time fixing mistakes made by that person which had rendered that workstation partially or totally unusable.
All faculty Linux and MacOS X workstations managed by ARCS are "AFS clients", meaning that all software installed in the /afs/cad tree is available on that workstation, and that a user's account on that workstation (username, password, files) are identical to those on all other NJIT AFS clients.
Faculty Installation of Operating System on His/Her Workstation
If a faculty member installs the operating system on his/her workstation, that faculty member is entirely responsible for the consequences. If AFS client software is not available for the operating system installed by the faculty member, it is not the responsibility of ARCS to provide services that are normally available to AFS client machines for that workstation.
Installation of New Workstations
ARCS (arcs@njit.edu) must be given at least 3 weeks' notice on requests for installation of new workstations.
Relocation of Workstations and Peripherals
Faculty who wish to have computer equipment relocated should make arrangements to have that equipment moved. ARCS is not responsible for moving equipment.
Relocation of equipment often involves the need to install or activate network ports at the new location. Faculty should arrange for this on their own by contacting the IST Service Desk at 973.596.2900 or http://help.njit.edu.
If the equipment that is to be relocated is managed by ARCS, the faculty member who is requesting the move should send mail to arcs@njit.edu prior to the move to request the machine be shut down properly. Once the system has been relocated, ARCS should be contacted to bring the system online.
Dual Boot
ARCS does not support dual boot workstations, i.e., Linux and Windows the same machine. Workstations that are managed by ARCS run various cron jobs which are used for system logging and to provide updates to the operating system. In order to ensure the integrity and security of any workstation that ARCS manages, it is required that the Linux workstation be available and online at all times.
Local Home Directory
Faculty who wish to have their login (home) directory local to their machine, i.e., not in AFS, may do so. Please contact arcs@njit.edu for details on how to synchronize your local login directory with your AFS login directory.
Backups of Local Data
Faculty are responsible for making their own backups of any local data on their machine. Such data will not be backed up via the enterprise backup system