Computer access and use policies

Last revision October 3, 2005

Pangea is provided to support teaching, learning, and unsponsored research in the School of Earth Sciences. Minor amounts of personal and sponsored research use are tolerated.

Only persons affiliated with the Stanford School of Earth Sciences may get accounts to access the pangea system. Faculty, staff, students, post-docs, and visitors with a normal appointment (for example, visiting Professor) are eligible for "regular" accounts. Regular accounts are left open for six months after the person leaves Stanford and then closed (all files are deleted). Email can be forwarded indefinitely after an account is closed.

Faculty may contact the pangea system manager to sponsor former students or other persons not affiliated with the School for guest accounts for limited time periods in order to work together on common projects. Stanford students who are not majoring in Earth Sciences, but who need access to pangea for course work, may also get a guest account for that academic quarter only; instructors or teaching assistants must apply to the system manager for these.

Don't share your SUNet ID, pangea account, or other University computer accounts with anyone. Sharing is a security risk and a violation of Stanford's computing and network policies that can lead to disciplinary action. Don't use your pangea account for any money-making or illegal activities. Don't try to use more than your fair share of the resources or to interfere with the use or privacy of others. See the Stanford University Computer and Network Usage Policy for more information on these general University policies.

Logoff pangea when you are done using the system, especially when you leave in the evening. Leaving a login session running continuously wastes system memory.

Don't waste disk space. Don't keep more than 200 Megabytes of files in your pangea home directory (30 Megabytes for guest accounts) or more than 30 Megabytes in your "pangea Aufs" AppleShare directory. Use scratch disk areas for temporary or large files. For more information on disk usage, see Pangea file system uses and policies.

Don't accumulate more than 200 Megabytes of old email in your "inbox". Don't configure your email program to "leave mail on server" indefinitely. Individual email messages sent through pangea cannot exceed 50 Megabytes in size, including attachments. To transfer a lot of data, use ftp instead, described in Options for off-site file transfer.

Run only one big job at a time, and use lower priority, according to the Rules for running "big jobs" on pangea.

While reasonable effort is made to preserve the privacy of electronic mail communications, there are circumstances in which someone could obtain unauthorized access to another's email. In addition, email is regularly backed up on tapes that are kept for some time, and those can be subpoenaed in a court action. The safest policy is to never send anything potentially embarrassing or injurious in email. For more information, see Rules and policies for the pangea email system.

Think about the consequences when you "stretch the limits" of computer programs. The computer memory, CPU, and other resources are limited, and cannot scale up indefinitely. One very important example is trying to search the entire file system for a specific file. Read about the correct way to search the pangea file system in Never run the "find" command to search the root (/) directory.

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