Accounts

Creation

Accounts are created for people doing CS research, faculty, graduate students, staff, CS concentrators, undergraduates doing research with a CS faculty member and students taking CS courses.

All accounts expire when the owner's association with the department ends. All accounts must have a faculty sponsor, either directly or through registration for a course. Requests for accounts for graduate students are made by a graduate student representative at the start of the academic year. Requests for undergraduate accounts are made by a faculty member or by TAs at the beginning of each semester.

Expiration

Each account will have an expiration date associated with it. A review of all accounts is done at the beginning and end of each semester. Idle accounts, ones who's expiration date has arrived, or ones not associated with a course are slated for removal. All accounts on the list will not automatically be removed - the expiration date is just an administrative guide and is quite easily extended at faculty request. A list of accounts to be removed is emailed to announce@list.cs.brown.edu (all cs accounts get a copy) and individual mail is sent to each person on the list informing them of the upcoming removal of their account. About a month, between posting the list and removing the accounts, is given to be sure everyone has had the opportunity to respond if necessary.

Undergraduate

Undergraduate accounts login with a special shell, called "fsh", which checks the amount of space being used against the amount of space allocated them. Depending upon the outcome of that check, fsh will either continue with the login or switch to a limited shell. The limited shell gives users the opportunity to remove or compress files. If their usage is reduced to match their quota, the user can then login.

The fsh shell calculates each student's quota based on their group membership. Students will receive quota space for courses that they are taking, for being a concentrator, for being a department employee, or for doing research with a CS faculty member. Some examples of this are:

consultant: 5 MB

concentrator: 30 MB

cs015student: 25 MB

cs123student: 9 MB

graphics: 10 MB

sprrsch: 10 MB

Students whose accounts use this system can check their list of identities, amount of space allowed, and amount of space they are using with the /usr/local/bin/usage command.